


The Emerald Band

by Firerose



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: 19th century attitudes on gender, 19th century attitudes on race, Case Fic, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-12
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:18:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2752517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firerose/pseuds/Firerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>How can I describe the sight that so unmanned my imperturbable friend? That caused the giant of a baronet to faint dead away? I could say Drago’s green-soaked body would no longer haunt my dreams—or if it did, it would be but a pleasant respite from the horror of that thing.</i> </p><p>Rache & his faithful doctor investigate the murder of Julia Stoner in the 'Study in Emerald' universe, but the deeper they delve into the Roylott family history, the darker things become</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zaganthi (Caffiends)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffiends/gifts).



We had done the right thing. We had struck a blow for freedom of our enslaved race. Once I believed that. Then the reprisals began. Her Victorious Majesty was terrible in her wrath. Week after week, _The Star_ came out with thick black borders, and every issue carried lists of ‘traitors’ deemed to have Restorationist sympathies on no greater evidence than their failing to turn seawards before their evening chop.

We moved, my friend and I, from lodging to lodging, seldom staying above hours, never above a single night, Moriarty’s hounds ever running on our scent. But I had lived out of my pack before, in Afghanistan, in far less comfortable surroundings; had been hunted by a force far more awful than Her Majesty’s police. When one has walked through a valley choked with the writhing bodies of men turned witless as worms; when one has felt the Shadow pressing pressing—but I shall not think on that. Dwelling on the past is a weakness we can ill afford, as my friend daily reminds me. His nerves are steel, but even he cries out in his sleep some nights when the moon drips blood in the sky, red blood, not like—

The future. We must look to the future. Those momentous events in Russia that crowded on the heels of our own act: dare one hope that the Czar Unanswerable, the Great Alexander, has been destroyed? We had hoped before, some fifteen years past, when whispers spread of the death of He Who Presides Over the New World. But the renewal ceremony came, and Abraham arose from the blood of the sacrifices as he ever did. Some say the Old Ones do not live as men do, and cannot be killed. Nightly I dream that the creature’s blood, green as lime leaves, coalesces back into his hideous form, and—

But my wits are wandering. My friend has made a study of the lore of the Old Ones, what little is written in obscure volumes in illicit libraries; or spoken of in hushed tones by men with pallid and ghastly faces, and hair streaked with white before its time; or scratched on stone in caverns long lost to map or memory. I believe my friend even once trained for the priesthood, a step he said ‘formed as sound a basis for the vocation of a stage actor as ever a man might want.’ But he would never be drawn on whether the Old Ones could be destroyed absolutely. ‘I never theorise in advance of data,’ were his invariable words, and I replied as invariably that what he meant was, he never declared his theories.

‘Well, when the dust in St Petersburg has settled, perhaps we’ll have some data on the Russian line.’ It took me a moment to realise that the voice was not in my own head, and then I turned to catch sight of my friend’s face poking up through the trapdoor into the airless garret above a wine-seller’s that was tonight’s billet. There was a twist to his mouth that was the nearest the man came to a smile. ‘And now you will bleat that you have not the slightest idea how I deduced what you were thinking,’ he said, as the remainder of his frame followed his head into the attic. He was disguised today as a workman of the sort one saw on every street corner, and by some magic he had conjured six or eight inches off his tremendous height. The crossbeams of the roof were not to be so easily deceived, though: as he bent almost in twain to squeeze beneath one, the illusion vanished. ‘I’ll spare you the trouble,’ he said. ‘You were staring fixedly at the candle, so abstracted that you failed to notice my entrance for thirty-two seconds, though I took no pains to be silent on the ladder—’

‘And I too will spare you the trouble,’ I rejoined. My thoughts these days revolved a scant few topics over and over, and it did not take an intellect of the magnitude of my friend’s to intuit what might be on my mind. ‘Is that today’s paper?’

‘It is. And there is a name in it that I think will be familiar to you, and for once it is not on their infernal lists. Although,’ he added, bleakly, ‘it is a fine circumstance when the murder of someone whose name one recalls counts as good news.’

‘Murder! Who is it?” I demanded.

‘A Miss Julia Stoner.’

The name meant nothing to me. ‘But who is she?’

‘I was relying on you, my dear fellow, for that intelligence.’

While my friend was Albion’s foremost expert on the Old Ones, and a physicist with a wide knowledge of cosmology besides, my role was to be a sort of aide-memoire for all matters of a less exalted nature. ‘Stoner,’ I said, searching my memory. ‘Was there not a Brigadier of that name? Of the Bengal Army? No, now I remember! Major-General Henry Stoner, awarded the Star of Victoria for his part in subduing the sepoys in the ’49 Mutiny—’

‘And then flayed alive a couple of years later on suspicion of his involvement in the Chittagong Plot,’ said my friend, grimly. ‘I knew I had the name from somewhere.’ He took a peculiar kind of pride in forgetting information not pertinent to his causes.

The Chittagong Plot was among the most audacious Restorationist acts of this century. The Royal Yacht, moored overnight just off the coast by the port city, had been blown into matchwood by a dredger packed with dynamite. The Queen, the sole survivor, had swum to safety unscathed. It was the last time she had left the shores of Albion.

‘It might not be the same family,’ I said.

My friend handed the paper to me, cunningly folded so that today’s list was concealed. ‘The _Eye_ ’s hack calls them “notorious.”’

> **Tragedy Strikes Again at Stoke Moran—Locked Room Death Baffles Police**
> 
> The sudden and unexplained death of Miss Julia Stoner, aged thirty, of Stoke Moran in Surrey, continues to baffle local police. Miss Stoner was the daughter of the late Lady Roylott, who was struck down in a railway accident, only eleven months ago. The mansion’s residents were awoken in the early hours of Monday morning by a blood-curdling shriek. The unfortunate lady staggered from her bedroom, clad only in a nightgown, to collapse in the passage. Sir Grimesby Roylott, whose name must be familiar to all our readers as one of the most illustrious personages of our land, hastened to render first aid to his stepdaughter, but she expired, only minutes later, in the arms of her twin sister, Miss Helen Stoner. No marks of violence were discovered on the deceased, who enjoyed excellent health. The surviving Miss Stoner has sworn that her sister’s bedroom was locked. The notorious surname of the deceased has led to speculation— _[Continued on page 3.]_

It was with no little incredulity that I drew my friend’s attention to the name ‘Roylott’: for _that_ name was known to both of us. Indeed, as _The Star_ attested, it was among the most ancient and glorious – which is to say, mildewed and blood-spattered – in all of Albion. The Roylotts boasted of having welcomed Her Victorious Majesty when she came ashore, seven centuries ago, at the city that now bears her name. Whether there was any truth in the boast or no, they had enjoyed royal patronage for centuries. It was Governor Sir Arthur Roylott who had ordered the Chittagong Massacre. Major-General Stoner’s widow must have married the Butcher of Bengal’s son!

‘A trip into the countryside will be just the thing to blow the cobwebs from our heads,’ said my friend. ‘Guildford, I think. The crocuses will be fading, but I have hopes of the daffodils.’

I would have thought that his great brain had shaken loose from its moorings in our reality but that the newspaper reported Her Majesty’s coroner would hold his court in the county town of that name on the morrow. I marvelled instead at his nerve, to suggest that the two most wanted criminals in all of Albion should stroll straight into Her Majesty’s courtroom, and thumb their noses at Her Majesty’s justice! We should as well walk up the Mall to Marble Arch, and tug on the Palace’s bell rope!

 


	2. The Courtroom

‘All rise for the coroner of Her Majesty, She who is called Victoria, and Gloriana, Queen of Greater and Lesser Albion, Empress of India!’

An observer might have noticed an elderly cleric with a pronounced stoop and his pink-cheeked deaconess among those who surged to their feet as the coroner climbed to his niche beneath the throne. How I had hated donning the wig and corset and padding of a woman during our months with the Strand Players! Now, as the great glowering eye atop the royal escutcheon scoured the courtroom from above the empty throne, I was glad of what little protection they might lend. That same symbol on my friend’s velvet cap cleared a space about us on the benches allotted to spectators, and ensured all lesser eyes slid from him, as from a withered limb, or disfiguring scar, or those inward depravities polite society chooses to ignore.

The coroner called first the housekeeper, one Mrs Mandeville – a small, thin soul between fifty and sixty who looked as though all the colour had been bled out of her. A woman of fixed habits, no apparent vices and limited sensibility, she seemed the pattern card of a servant who inspires excellent references but no great warmth of feeling. Her testimony was precise, but as she chanced to have been out of the house attending her sister’s sickbed on the night of the murder – for murder it must surely be, even if its perpetrator proved to be such as might only be prosecuted in the court of my dissecting knives – it did little save to establish the layout of the manor house and the general habits of its occupants.

The room in which Miss Stoner had been attacked was a guest bedroom, the grandest in the house, located on the ground floor of the central wing. No, Miss Stoner had not been accustomed to sleeping in that apartment. No, she had not ordered it prepared for her use. There had been some trifling problem with damp in Miss Stoner’s room, and she worried about her lungs. All the family usually slept on the first floor of the central wing. The servants were in the east wing. The west wing was shut up. It had not been in regular use since Sir Arthur’s day. The mistress had liked the great bedchamber always to be aired and ready in case of unexpected noble guests, and the master had never rescinded the order. The manor house rarely entertained house-parties, and never since the mistress’s death. The family was still in mourning. The housekeeper would not like to say, without checking her records, who the last guest to use the room had been. It had no connecting doors. The chimney was guarded with a grille. All the windows on the ground floor had shutters barred with iron bolts. There had been some trouble in the past with windows being smashed but no house-breaker had ever been apprehended. Yes, the two Misses Stoner were in the habit of locking their doors at night.

There followed a most interesting intelligence: a band of men ‘the colour of coffee’ had been seen roaming the neighbourhood. Hindoos, the landlord of the Crown called them. Indian snake-charmers was the word in the village. No, they had never come to the house. She was a devout woman and would never permit Heathens to enter the place. The remainder of her testimony related to the layout of the rooms, which the coroner went into at a length that tried my patience. The dining room and the library, the only rooms adjoining the great bedchamber, had been shut up since Lady Roylott’s death. The library – though the housekeeper bridled at the word, saying ‘no-one but the mistress ever looked at the things there’– had once been the mansion’s great hall: not so long, perhaps, after some Roylott ancestor had been welcoming our Queen. It occupied the full width of the house, rising right up to the rafters. None of the servants ever set foot within; Lady Roylott had always attended to it herself. The passage in which Miss Stoner had breathed her last was a blind inner hall, serving only the great bedchamber and dining room.

The cook, two housemaids and a scullery maid added much colour but little substance to the housekeeper’s account, except that the cook said ‘it were a right shame the poor lamb ’ad died not a fortnight short of ’er wedding’ and ‘’ad anyone thought to inform the poor Major?’ It was clarified that Miss Stoner had been engaged since Yuletide to marry one Major Thomason of the marines, but that the man had never entered the house and was believed to be with his regiment at Plymouth. The cook was the only servant to express any grief at the lady’s fate. Indeed, the scullery maid, the heartless wretch, seemed more concerned by the disappearance of the kitchen cat than the gruesome death of her master’s stepdaughter! The younger of the two housemaids volunteered that she would not wish to stick so much as her toes in the great chamber at night.

‘It’s right spooky, sir,’ she said, with a shudder. ‘They say Queen Victoria once slept there.’ No-one was foolish enough to make a sound in such a place, under such an unblinking scrutiny, or even to lean forward, but a little flurry like a shiver flew about the room as everyone but my imperturbable friend shifted in their seat. The coroner contrived, without uttering a word, to express the inadvisability of a person of her class repeating That Name in the august air of the courtroom, and the unfortunate girl was escorted from the witness stand by two constables, babbling that she ‘meant no disrespect by it.’

My friend took advantage of the disturbance to murmur beside my ear, ‘I see now why our dear friend chooses to waste his energies on detection. It is a most stimulating pursuit! We must devise a ruse to get into the house. The bedroom! The library! I am sure the key to the mystery lies in the heart of the house.’

I wanted to draw my friend’s attention rather to the Indians, but the housemaid was hustled out, no doubt to cool her toes in a cell, and the coroner rose to call Miss Helen Stoner.

The lady’s face was concealed behind a heavy veil, and the deepest of mourning muffled her figure, so that all that could be made out was an impression of height. The coroner, presented with a witness who was at once the daughter of a condemned traitor to the blood royal and the stepdaughter of the most prominent monarchist in the county, decided upon a frosty civility. He desired that she might lift her veil before taking the oath. She threw it back. Her dark hair had a great long white streak, and her face bore the traces, unmistakable to any with like experience, of one who has recently been touched by the Shadow. It brought to mind the ashes of a log that hold together after the fire has burned out.

The blood drained from the coroner’s florid face, till it was almost as grey as hers. My friend turned his fullest attention upon the lady, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. She took the oath in a low flat voice, settled herself on the stool provided in deference to her class and began, at the coroner’s direction, to narrate the circumstances surrounding her sister’s engagement – which had been entered into on a visit to a maternal aunt, Miss Westphail, the two sisters’ only living relative – all in the same low monotone, as if a stone should speak. The coroner next enquired as to the major’s character.

‘I have never met him,’ the lady replied. ‘My sister described him as gentle and kind.’

‘Did your sister never meet Major Thomason in the fifteen weeks between Yuletide and her death?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Sir Grimesby does not entertain and we rarely travel.’

‘Might the engagement have been broken off?’

It was evident that this idea had not occurred to the lady, and it shook her. ‘I do not believe it possible,’ she said, with more animation than she had shown before. ‘My sister was eager to enter the marital state, the major was a diligent correspondent, and Sir Grimesby offered no objection. The delay was occasioned only by my sister’s wish not to slight our dear mother’s memory. She was to be married a year and a day after our mother’s accident.’ She raised her chin, and for a moment her chalk-white face seemed but a mask for the fierce blaze of her eyes. ‘How I wish I had urged her to give up her scruples!’ she cried. ‘She might have left behind this house of evil!’

I had underestimated the lady when I trembled lest she should crumble: the fire had refined her, not consumed her. It was as if all the soft human sentiments had been sucked out, leaving only a thirst for vengeance, hard as adamantine. I had seen it before, in men in Afghanistan. Their lives were measured in weeks – or days – and their fates were too foul to render in words. I had never before observed it in a woman. It was terrible to see.

The coroner could not suppress a shudder at her words, but he was not foolish enough to draw further attention to them by rebuking her. He turned to an examination of Miss Julia Stoner’s state of mind in the weeks leading up to her death. Her sister averred that she had been contented: the only disruption to her serenity, and it a minor one, was the delay to her wedding preparations attendant on the housekeeper’s frequent leaves of absence. (The woman’s own sister was dying of cancer.) She had never expressed any fears or doubts about the marriage, never given any indication she might take her own life, never complained of any illness or pain.

‘The housekeeper mentioned that Miss Stoner had a concern about her lungs. Was that not so?’

‘Oh, no! It was not my sister who was concerned, it was I. How I wish I had never mentioned the subject! Sir Grimesby, sunk in his grief for his beloved wife, neglected to instruct anyone to undertake the usual annual overhaul of the roof. The unusually heavy winter snow took its toll, and my sister’s bedroom sprang several leaks – so much so that on nights when wind accompanied heavy rain, it became impossible to find a position to place the bed for the surety of not waking to soaked sheets. We laughed together, she and I, that in a house of thirty bedrooms, she should suffer such indignity. The Deepsday before her death, there was a tremendous storm that took several trees in the park and seemed as though it would carry the roof with them, and in the week following, squall after squall blew through. I worried that she would take pneumonia, and eventually persuaded her to seek another bedchamber. I offered to exchange with her, but she would not hear of it. Mrs Mandeville was away in the village, and the only bedroom made up that was not also subject to the leaks was the great bedchamber. Being on the ground floor, it was not affected by the problems with the roof. My sister laughed to be sleeping in such a grand big bed in such a grand big room, but the fireplace was sound, and with a good blaze and a warming-pan it seemed snug enough.’

‘This change in sleeping arrangements occurred on the night of her death?’

‘No, it occurred two nights previously.’

‘So Miss Stoner slept in the great bedchamber on three nights in all, Fireday, Starsday and Deepsday?

‘That is correct.’

‘Who in the household was informed of the change?’

‘Cook was applied to for the key, in the absence of Mrs Mandeville. I recall telling Elsie, as she was required to fetch fresh coal. Either she or I must have told Jane, as she brought my sister’s coffee to the correct room. But the inside servants all sup together, so it is likely that by Starsday all would have known.’

I would have wagered that by Starsday, every soul in the village would have known – and by the night of the death, every soul on the entire estate. Such is the nature of rural life. We had survived more than three weeks in the metropolis, and held out the hope of surviving many more. We could not have lain concealed for three days in the country.

The coroner spent some time going over the matter of the key, as he had with the housekeeper – both agreed that there was only one, it was of a large and antique design, and would be difficult to copy – before returning to the fatal night.

‘Sir Grimesby retired to his room soon after dinner,’ the lady commenced, ‘but he seemed troubled by something, walking up and down without ceasing. His room adjoins mine, and the noise kept me from my rest. I wrapped myself in my shawl, and went downstairs to join my sister in the great bedchamber. We sat for some time on the bed, side by side, talking of our hopes and dreams. The fire had died down. The room was wreathed in darkness. The wind whined outside the shutters and the rain battered against the window panes, as if some great creature were trying to enter. I had heard all the stories the credulous relay about the chamber, and it should have been frightening. But inside the stiff brocade hangings of the great four-poster bed, all was calm. It was as if we had been transported on some magical carpet back to infancy in the nursery in Calcutta. I even conjured up the smell of the warm spiced milk our mother used to make for us! When the clock chimed eleven I rose to leave, but my sister stayed me, laying her hand on my arm. Given the awful events later that night that were to sever her from me forever, the conversation is graven on my memory.

‘“Tell me, Helen,” she said, “have you ever heard piping in the dead of the night?”

‘I said that I had not, and she continued, “I suppose you have not taken up playing the piccolo at night?” Again I denied it, this time with a laugh, for I thought she must be joking. But her face was in deadly earnest. I begged her to tell me what she meant.

‘“On each of the nights that I have spent in this room I have been awakened, about three in the morning, by the sound of someone playing a pipe. You know how light a sleeper I am! There is no tune that I have ever heard, but rather a melancholy collection of notes, repeated over and over. I could not say which direction it comes from – sometimes it seems to emanate from the library, sometimes from the lawn.” And again she asked whether I had heard anything of the sort.

‘“No, never,” I replied. “It must be those Indians everyone in the village has been chattering about.”

‘“Quite possibly. There is supposed to be some sort of a snake-charmer. Do they not play a pipe?”

‘“Or perhaps there is another band of house-breakers,” I suggested. “It could be them signalling to one another. Shall I rouse our stepfather?”

‘“No, let him sleep. He has been looking so haggard of late. We don’t want him looking like some dissolute wretch when he comes to give me away! What would my dear Edward think? And in any case, if it came from outside on the lawn, you should surely hear it also.”

‘“But I am on the first floor. And besides I sleep more heavily than you.”

‘“Well, it is of no great consequence. The shutters have baffled the most determined of robbers before now.” And so saying she loosed my arm, and lit me to the door with her bed-candle. I entreated her to lock the door after me. She promised to do so, and as I turned away I heard the key turn.’

‘Are you certain that the lock engaged?’ interjected the coroner. ‘You understand it is a most vital point.’

‘I heard the clank as it did so. It is a heavy lock, and the sound is clearly audible.’

The lady then went into her sister’s dreadful end – the wild shriek, the mysterious click, the figure at the doorway, the collapse, the doomed attempts at revival – all tallied point for point with the newspaper reports. But there were details no newspaper would print, details no sane citizen of Albion would breathe in public. The coroner, a military man, understood as well as my friend and I the import of the face blanched with the utmost dread, the writhing limbs, the charnel reek, the chill of death on one whose heart still beat. He did his best to curtail her account on grounds of the great distress it was causing her, but – unless he should have her dragged bodily from the stand – the lady would be heard.

There were details, too, that were obscure even to me. What meant the melancholy piping? The single distinct click? But it was Julia Stoner’s final words that caused the greatest frisson in the courtroom—

‘It was the band! The emerald band!’

The coroner bent his efforts towards retrieving the situation. He ordered a glass of water brought for the witness, and lumbered down to give it to the lady in person – accompanied, no doubt, by solemn words of warning. And perhaps also of promise, for when he resumed his interrogation she seemed a shade less desperate.

‘Are you certain those were your sister’s exact words?’ he enquired.

‘Positive.’

‘You could not have misheard them? Perhaps in all the tumult of the gale?’

‘They were very clear.’

‘And what did you understand by them?’

The very silence in the courtroom seemed a living thing as every soul – or, at least, every soul not wholly blind to the nature of this society we inhabit – held their breath.

‘I am not sure,’ the lady said, at length. ‘My mother brought a great many things back from Calcutta, and when we were children we were occasionally allowed to play with them as a Deepsday treat. A particular favourite was a long green scarf that we dressed up in for theatricals. We often wound it round our heads as a band. I do not know what became of it.’

‘Is it not more likely that they referred to some item of jewellery?’

‘Perhaps. I went through my mother’s jewel case with Julia not a week before her death, to pick out something she might wear on her wedding day. I recall few emerald pieces. My mother’s dark colouring was more suited to rubies. There might be other pieces in Sir Grimesby’s safe.’

‘Where is that located?’

‘In the library. A collection of Indian curios is displayed there. Sir Grimesby had a safe installed to house some of the more valuable items after one of the attempts at robbery.’

‘When was that?’

‘A little over a year ago.’

The coroner was at pains to go over some small details of the testimony that might be screwed about to hint at suicide, but there the lady held firm, and shortly departed the stand unveiled, head held high, the eyes of every person present following her. To the relief of all, a short recess was announced before the final witness of the day: no lesser personage than Sir Grimesby Roylott himself. We sauntered, my clerical friend and I, down the steps outside the courthouse and, with a few turns, found ourselves in a quiet quadrangle enclosing a garden. The promised daffodils were a little blowsy, but there were purple and crimson irises a-plenty, and a handsome cherry just on the point of bursting into riotous bloom, each fat bud a slightly different shade of pink. The scene made a strange contrast to the lurid details Miss Stoner had unfolded. I should have been glad to linger, but my friend grasped my arm and bent our steps towards a gate. As we slipped through it onto the street, he shed both velvet cap and stoop, and shrugged off twenty years, to stride in what I dimly recollected was the direction of the station.

‘Slow down, I beg you!’ I said. ‘I swear it’s harder to walk in skirts than to parade in full dress uniform with a long-sword! Are we not to stay to hear Sir Grimesby?’

‘I have no doubt his testimony will agree in every particular with Miss Stoner’s account.’

‘You think they colluded on their evidence?’

‘No, I do not. Miss Stoner is a brave woman but a foolish one. “The band! The emerald band!” I think Sir Grimesby would have given much to keep his stepdaughter’s final words secret. He will no doubt be at pains to detail every piece of jewellery in his late wife’s collection that might conceivably meet that description. If he is clever he will invent some priceless tiara studded with emeralds from India, declare it missing, and call loudly for the arrest of the Indians. That is what I should do. The coroner will follow Roylott’s lead, and no-one will have to rack their brains as to who can safely be blamed. Keep up! We will miss our train.’

‘You cannot conceive of how difficult it is to walk encumbered like this!’

‘Perhaps that is so, but I will soon give you the satisfaction of seeing how I manage the challenge.’ We reached the station, and my friend purchased tickets to Leatherhead. He thrust a bulky packet into my arms, directed my steps towards those conveniences designed for the fairer sex and, to my surprise, followed me within. ‘Two minutes, no more!’

All those necessaries to resume my accustomed attire were in the parcel; my friend must have concealed them beneath his robes. I had become used to quick changes, of course, but it was an awkward business in the cramped quarters, and I emerged somewhat after the stated interval to find a lady powdering her nose in the glass. ‘Oh, beg pardon, ma’am,’ I said. ‘My wife dropped her glove.’

‘“My wife dropped her glove!”’ came the sarcastic drawl of my friend. He made a striking woman. I had shared lodgings with the man for over a year, observed him in all moods from delight to dejection, watched him play all mankind from the meanest to the most exalted. I had never before seen him in a dress. It was a curious sensation. ‘Quick, wipe that rouge from your cheeks,’ he said. His own cheeks seemed a little flushed, and his eyes glittered in the glass. ‘A darker base, I think. Number 9 should do the trick.’ He handed me a stick of grease-paint. ‘And you’ll need a moustache. A good big one.’


	3. The Crown

My friend’s plan – no less than that I should impersonate the coroner at the mansion house, whilst both the man and the family were safe at court – was a daring one, and only a gentleman entering our carriage at Bookham put a stop to our arguments over its advisability. My friend overestimated my talents as an actor, which were limited, and not only by comparison with his own genius in that sphere. In vain did I protest, when we alighted at Leatherhead, that I looked nothing like the coroner.

‘And what, pray, does he look like?’ my friend enquired, in that silky tone of voice that meant the checkmate was in his sight. Besides short, fat, ex-military, of late middle years, and possessed of a moustache of a peculiarly luxuriant type, I had to admit that I had formed no very exact picture. ‘Precisely. You look but you do not see – you and ninety-nine men of a hundred along with you – to our great fortune.’ And he favoured me with a potted history of the coroner that covered the laxity of his valet, the indifference of his wife, and the man’s complete career in the service of our Queen. (In former days, I would have accused him of looking the man up in _Albion’s Greats_ , but our books had been one of the more painful sacrifices to our cause.) ‘But to you and your fellows, the moustache is all!’ was his triumphant conclusion. And in the guise of a not-yet-indifferent spouse straightening my collar, he pressed the monstrous thing he had selected more firmly to my upper lip.

So far was he right: the moustache bought me access to the house. The stable boy left to mind the door was eager to show me the exact spot on which Miss Stoner had expired; he displayed great energy in sounding the guest chamber panels and attacking its shutters from without – and while he was so occupied, I pursued those other examinations that my friend had impressed upon me as of the utmost import. But ‘key’s gone missing, sir,’ was the rejoinder when I demanded to examine the library, and not even an impression of my Candahar sergeant-major that did justice to my friend’s inflated account of my abilities was sufficient to breach that door.

I repaired to the public bar of the Crown in the village, prepared to own my failure to my friend, but he was nowhere to be seen. Despite the early hour, there was a merry scene within: a buxom blonde, whose every vulgar gesture proclaimed her profession, was leading the assembly in a chorus of ‘A Little of What You Fancy.’ I sat down on the fringe of the crowd and fell into despondency. Of what conceivable significance could it be that, concealed amidst the peacock design of the wallpaper, a spyhole surveyed the bed? A snake could scarce have slithered through it!

The din in the bar began to pall. The vast mass of humanity seemed indifferent to the horrors perpetrated amongst them by our masters. And then the yellow-haired charmer had the brass to seat herself beside me! ‘Buy a lady a drink?’ she said. I was halfway from my seat to complain to the landlord when she caught my arm. ‘No need to stir yourself! The bar-maid’ll bring it.’ I recognised my friend by the strength in those long fingers.

‘My blushes,’ he breathed, so quietly that I had to lean almost till our faces brushed to make his words out. ‘Seldom have I received such a sincere testament to my skills than that look of revulsion that overspread your features when I sat down! But perhaps it is as well that no-one else noticed my triumph.’

‘I didn’t know you numbered music among your talents.’ It struck me then quite how poignantly my friend must miss performing to an audience.

‘I once played second violin with the Berlin Opera. But what of the scene of the murder?’

I confirmed his guess as to the existence of a spyhole – ‘no guess, my friend. How many daydreams have an olfactory component? A deduction’ – and gave vent to my frustration at how little progress I had made that afternoon. There seemed no way in which the human hands behind this vile act could be brought to light.

‘It is fortunate, then,’ he murmured in my ear, under cover of activities of a more intimate nature, ‘that my labours have proved rather more fruitful than yours. I have spoken to quite half the souls in the village, from the rector to the poacher, though he did not introduce himself under that title. I have engaged myself to half a dozen pursuits, of which marriage is perhaps the least distasteful, and I think I can say—’

But just then a tremendous hubbub broke out. The party of mansion house servants had returned from Guildford, and proposed to fortify themselves against the quarter-mile walk down the driveway in the dark.

‘Suicide!’ cried one. ‘I can’t believe the old duffer gave it as suicide.’

‘What in the stars did you think would happen?’

‘Like mother, like daughter!’

‘Ol’ Jamieson has that great beak of his so deep in the Roylotts’ pocket he wouldn’t know an opinion if it bit him on the you-know-where!’

I had not thought to divest myself of my coroner’s guise, beyond removing the loathsome moustache. It seemed wise, lest my omission prove disastrous, to decamp to the rooms I had bespoken earlier – which we did to the accompaniment of remarks of a nature to make my cheeks redden, if only on behalf of my friend.

But he was as unembarrassed as ever. ‘At least no-one will interrupt us for, what, ten minutes?’ he observed.

‘Ten minutes?’ I tried to enter into the spirit of the jest. ‘Twice that, surely!’

‘Fifteen minutes, then.’ He placed the room’s single chair beside the bed, sat down and fished his pocket watch out of its hiding place amidst his chest padding. He laid it beside him on the table. He had not removed his make-up nor that ridiculous yellow wig, yet there was nothing of the feminine about him now. I took my seat on the bed. My friend gestured to me to make enough noise to cover his words, and the bed-springs proved sufficiently worn that it was not difficult to comply.

‘The Roylotts are not in general popular,’ he began, ‘at least not the present generation of the family. Many of the older folk hanker after Sir Arthur’s day, back when Stoke Moran could still, so they say, hold its head as high as any spot in Albion. They take the Jubilee Oak on the green having fallen in the recent storm as a judgement on the current generation. I wish I had a sovereign for every person who told me, oh so solemnly, that Her Majesty Herself was entertained at this very manor house in the first Sir Arthur’s time – though whether that was in the fourteenth century or the fifteenth is a matter not quite settled.’

‘So what that girl said was true, then? The Queen actually slept in the great bedchamber?’

‘If ten people saying it make it true, then without a doubt. Though by that measure we nightly visit the most unspeakable of acts on virgins torn from their mother’s breast.’

And that was just what _The Star_ had cared to print. The things I had seen scrawled upon walls, or overheard whilst queuing for our daily loaf! It gave me a reason – yet another reason – to rejoice that I had neither kith nor kin in Albion.

‘In so far as it goes,’ my friend continued, ‘it might be true. I do not believe their kind sleep, not on any daily cycle at least. But I’m at a loss as to how it might relate to Miss Stoner’s murder. There are many crimes one might lay at our monarch’s door, but her fidelity to Albert is legendary.’

I had written one of my single-act plays on the subject of the five-hundred-year, death-defying love of Victoria and her Adalbert–Albrecht–Albert. It was a great favourite with the public, receiving standing ovations every time we performed it.

‘As to our most obvious suspect,’ he went on, ‘the natives are divided on Sir Grimesby. Some hold that he murdered his wife, others that he’s been keeping her imprisoned in the disused wing of the manor, and still others seem to be capable of holding both opinions simultaneously! They should go far! There are any number of reports of lights and comings and goings in the disused wing, mostly from those who suppose it to be haunted by the ghost of Amelia Roylott, who was indeed murdered by her husband. A few even claim to have seen the ghost of the most recent Lady Roylott. I discount most of them—but I’m forgetting. My most interesting news is that Miss Smith was carried off by a sudden cold snap in the third week of the new year. You remember those blizzards that closed all the theatres? A most merciful end from pneumonia, I was told, by a very respectable lady who does the teas for the afternoon service. I was attired more piously myself back then, of course.’

‘And who the devil is Miss Smith? The maiden aunt?’

‘The devil may prove quite to the point, my friend. The deeper I look into this the blacker my suspicions.’ His eye roved over the watch on the table. ‘But there is no time.’ And he sprang from the chair and began straight away to repair his apparel and repaint his face – reddening his lips and placing a quite unnecessary blemish on his white neck – whilst I put the finishing touches to the auditory effect.

There was nothing to be gained from asking my friend a question he did not desire to answer – he did enjoy his little mysteries – and I restrained my curiosity as best I could.

 


	4. The Performance

I had expected my friend to don some fresh masculine disguise. But – though ‘she’ wore the same gown as the trollop – it was my supposed wife from the station who met me downstairs in the saloon. I set myself the task of learning to see, not merely look. The yellow hair was another moustache, that much was clear. And little touches – the fringed gold shawl, the severe white collar – made a plain brown dress seem a tawdry crimson on the one hand and a rusty black on the other. I even thought I might recognise the gaudy shawl from the Strand’s wardrobe.

Our discussions on where best to direct our efforts for the remainder of the evening had fixed upon the churchyard when the landlord slipped in to announce that – if the quality would care to join the crowds – the Hindoos were about to give an exhibition of their arts in the public bar. My ‘wife’ expressed no little curiosity to view the Heathen spectacle, if the gentlemen could reassure her it was quite safe. The landlord gave grave assurances on this point, but my wife continued her chatter with neither sense nor pause as we took our seats, to the beat of a hand-drum. The men who had earlier vied for her favour gave me those looks of consolation one ill-married man exchanges with another. I found myself moving her chair, quite unconsciously, and helping to arrange her skirts to her liking. Was this what life would have held for me were I still a respectable doctor, invalided with honour from my military service?

The Indians made their salaams. White robed and turbaned, the three seemed designed to illustrate the ages of man: boyhood, manhood and old age. The show opened with the middle one manipulating brass balls while the boy beat time upon the drum. It was nothing like the crude comedy one saw at the music halls of the metropolis. He could make one ball wink in and out of existence, hold as many as five in the air at once, and send them cascading like water or flying about his head like swallows – and all with such ease, as if the balls answered to his command! And this was but the preliminary. The juggler conjured a pipe out of the air; to its mournful sounds, the old man shuffled in, led by the boy, to sit cross-legged on a cushion. Some pantomime indicated the man was blind. With much ceremony, and many gasps from the audience – chief among them my wife – a great clay urn was carried in and set down before the old man. He removed the lid – my wife shrieked and clutched my arm – and drew out snake after snake, displaying them to the audience and draping them around his neck in a writhing necklace. Most were too dozy in the evening chill to put on much of a show, and some not even venomous. But one drew a sharp squeeze to my arm: a vivid green specimen—could _this_ be our emerald band? After that I scarcely paid attention as the old man went through the usual routine, and the snakes swayed to his companion’s pipe.

‘An Indian pit viper,’ breathed my friend, as the boy brought round the hat. ‘See if you can get a closer look at the beauty.’

I feigned as great an interest in snakes as any arm-chair herpetologist, and exclaimed over how dangerous a snake-bite could be. ‘Why, a man could be laid out by one of these things in a trice! I’ve seen a soldier, healthy as a pack-mule, step on a viper out in the desert, and be dead before his fellows realised what had happened.’

The juggler, perhaps annoyed that his show of skill had been upstaged by a blind old man and some reptiles, explained in limping English that the snakes were safe as kittens. He uncovered the urn and pried open the mouth of a cobra to reveal that its fangs had been removed. ‘See? He no bite. They all no bite.’

I was trying to get a look at the pit viper when the old man joined us. His pupils resembled curdled milk, and his beard and moustache stood very white against a skin rendered even darker by the liver spots of age. He spoke to me in one of the native languages; I knew a smattering from my service on that continent. His words sent a chill to my heart. ‘You are drenched in blood,’ he said, if I understood him aright. ‘Emerald blood. Do not deny it! I see it. But the Shadow touches you not. You must help us. Long ago that accursed family stole something from my people, something more precious than gold, more precious even than the finest emeralds. They brought it here. You must help us to—’

But just then the landlord bustled up. ‘This fellow pestering you, sir? Be off with you!’ And he shooed the Indians away like so many dogs sniffing about the Deepsday roast.

‘My wife was concerned about the danger to the public,’ I thought it wise to explain. I could not tell how much the man had heard. ‘But you know how these Indians are, when they get going with their jibber-jabber. No end to their nonsense.’

The hour now approached ten o’clock. My friend and I reverted to our earlier scheme of investigating the churchyard; I tried to accustom myself to strolling most sedately with him leaning on my arm. ‘I don’t suppose that you happened to understand what that Indian fakir was saying to you?’ he enquired, as soon as we had rounded the corner from the inn. ‘I could see no way of managing to overhear without entirely giving up my horror of snakes.’

Though they brought to mind all that I should most wish to forget, I choked my way through a rendition of the man’s words, so strange and ominous. ‘But my understanding is so rudimentary he could well have been talking about the frightful weather here in Albion!’

My friend pressed my arm. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘you never cease to amaze me with your talents, and your modesty. And the old man actually repeated “emerald”, you say? This puzzle continues to excite! Is he truly blind, do you believe?’

‘With cataracts so advanced? By daylight he might perhaps see something akin to one of our pea-soup fogs – unless he’s somehow faking the appearance. Your skills have made me cautious! What did those keen eyes of yours tell you about that landlord?’

‘You also thought his interruption rather timely? He has most certainly served for some years in India, probably as someone’s batman – most likely Sir Grimesby’s, if the man was ever in the army.’ I thought my friend’s guess a sound one. The landlord’s skin bore the sallow tint of one accustomed to the tropical sun; such men often set up in the inn trade with their discharge bounty. ‘You will have to sleep with your pistol under your pillow,’ he said, ‘if we return to those rooms in the Crown.’

‘I’m loathe to give up the bed now that I’ve tested it so thoroughly,’ I rejoined. ‘I cannot recall when I last slept in one.’

‘The Chinese brothel. I do not believe that I have ever spent a less comfortable night.’

‘Ah yes, the scent made you sneeze.’ And with like recollections, most improper to our appearance as a respectably married couple, did we while away our walk. There were some dark nights when I thought such irreverent talk was all that stood between us and the madhouse.

 


	5. The Tomb

Seeking Smiths in an Albion graveyard was like looking for ashes in the grate. The clock struck eleven, then midnight. Tendrils of fog seeped in to twine about the black yews, and decorate our hair and clothes with dew drops. We had used up all but a few inches of our last candle without finding the Smith my friend sought – the housekeeper’s sister, as it turned out – when we stumbled across a solitary grave-marker, the name ‘Julia Anne Roylott’ stamped upon it in lead. The marble was steeped in gore by the ruddy glow of a near full moon, and the scored and stained turf of the shallow depression it guarded made a dismal picture. I have seen men by the hundred cut down in their prime. But there is a peculiar grimness to a young woman dead almost on the eve of her wedding.

‘They put her in the ground with unseemly haste,’ I observed.

A look of such horror as I had scarcely before seen passed over my friend’s features. ‘I _knew_ there was something I’d missed! You fool! You unutterable fool!’ It seemed to be himself he was castigating, for with each repetition he struck himself sharply on the forehead. ‘Hand me the candle! There is not a moment to lose!’ And he galloped in circles around the grave, his nose almost pressed against the grass, for all the world as if his error, whatever it was, had driven him clean out of his wits. Then quite as abruptly he quit his circling, and hared off towards a clump of rhododendrons some yards distant. ‘Come on!’ he cried, and he plunged into them.

It was a joke between us that my friend must have been a cat in some previous existence. The bushes bubbled out of the blackness beneath the boundary wall; I could barely make out my hand in front of my eyes, yet my friend seemed to be following some trail only he could see by the light of a guttering stump of a candle. ‘I knew it!’ he cried. The stiff branches clawed at my face and clutched at my ankles as if to hinder me from joining him. But when I entered the clearing he had gained, my friend’s find proved to be no more than a tumbledown brick structure, obscured by ivy: the collapsed remnants of some long-abandoned hut, or perhaps even an ice-house, the wall here being that high stone one surmounted by iron spikes that encircled the entire Roylott park. ‘Look!’ He pointed down at his feet. The grass had struggled to get a hold, and I could just make out a deep rut in the mud, and what might have been a footprint. ‘Hold the candle!’ And heedless of his dress, he fell to his knees and measured the print against the length of his hand. ‘A woman – or perhaps a boy.’

‘Or a dwarf,’ I suggested, amused at his theorising in advance of data for once.

‘But we have several women and two boys in this puzzle, and no dwarfs, as yet,’ he rejoined, quite seriously. ‘Not Sir Grimesby, I think even you will allow.’ The man was reputed to be a giant.

‘Most likely the Indian boy.’ I eyed the park wall that loomed over our heads, my mind returning to the strange words of the fakir. ‘If they intend to steal some priceless jewel back from the Roylotts, the boy might scale the wall here without fear of being seen.’

‘Why would he want to do that?’ My friend took back the candle and examined the ivy-wreathed brickwork and the earth in front of it with a care neither seemed to warrant, all the while making little grunts as if of satisfaction. Then he pulled open a door that had quite escaped my notice. He held the light aloft. Brick steps descended into the absolute blackness of the pit. ‘When he could tunnel underneath.’

I began to have an inkling of how Miss Stoner had been murdered. ‘You mean this is a tunnel into the bedroom!’

‘Not unless your young assistant was incompetent. I believe it to be an even more interesting structure – a tunnel into the library. Shall we descend? We have wasted quite enough time as it is.’ And he bunched up his skirts in a fashion no lady would assay in public, and set off into the dark. ‘In one regard, you are correct,’ he added, over his shoulder. ‘Walking encumbered like this is a penance severe indeed!’

I felt the keenest of thrills stepping after him into the unknown, but we soon gained a smooth and level tunnel that, I must own, was far drier and less noisome than the metropolitan underground railway! The bricks that lined it were ancient and patched in places; some crumbled at our touch, and my friend stopped from time to time to examine the dust for traces. Though it was evident we were not the first to pass this way, no clear impressions remained. The tunnel curved sufficiently as to give no hint to its eventual length. ‘Seven hundred and fifty paces,’ my friend announced, after an indeterminate interval. ‘Which would be a rather more useful measure if I could be sure my stride length were not altered by this garb. A compass would have been invaluable! But I think we must be approaching the house. We should tread more lightly.’ Eight, nine hundred paces passed, but at the eighty-fourth the tunnel narrowed and its brick was exchanged for large stone blocks. My friend put his finger to his lips. Seventy-three paces later we tiptoed down a flight of steps and debouched into a broader stone passage that ran in both directions.

Hampered as we were by the single candle we could not separate, and not even my friend could say whether left or right was the correct choice. The branch we elected to explore led not to any entrance to the house above, but rather to a lime-washed cell, some four feet by six, its only contents a cot bed, a tin chest and a candle-holder. A strong smell of damp and decay overlaid all. A rumpled blanket covered the mattress, and a number of fine silk dresses, petticoats and other linens were tumbled together in the chest, as if stuffed away in haste. The villagers’ suspicions that Sir Grimesby was concealing his wife in the house might prove true, it seemed! The place made a cramped and chilly prison, barely larger than a tomb. My friend examined everything minutely, going so far as to bury his nose in both blanket and clothing, but found little of interest: only a few tufts of black hair, which he secreted in a glass vial he concealed within his corset. I conjectured they belonged to poor Lady Roylott.

‘Cat hair,’ my friend murmured. ‘It is as I feared. We are too late.’

Just then the candle failed. A few matches remained but the damp must have got to them, for they too sputtered and died. Darkness, true darkness, is hard to experience in our capital of four million souls. The new incandescents spill from the windows of the wealthy, gas lamps make the streets safe – even the rookery has its street-corner bonfires. And the friendly darkness of one’s own rooms, however black, holds no terrors. The invisible thing one’s foot touches as one shuffles out of bed in winter is sure to be the book that slipped from one’s hand, or the slippers discarded in too much haste, or at worst the tea tray and an overturned cup. No friendly darkness this, beneath a house where women expired from fear, where ancient evil prowled in dead of night! My friend took my hand and pressed it in his own cool one. Just so had he recalled me from a dozen nightmares whose content I would not dwell on here. He directed us out of the little cell, into the passage and along it.

It was then that I heard it. A sharp click—a halting shuffling footstep—a long low wailing note, succeeded by another and another and another. Julia Stoner had called it piping but it was no piping. It was if all the mindless cacophony of hell were distilled into a single sound. And there was more: an icy numbing chill as if some polar gale blasted the still air of the passage—a ghastly putrid stench as if plunged face down in a pile of corpses, bloated and seeping, and then one of the corpses stirred and grasped my arm—madness mastered me—I cried out—I was jerked against another body. A warm, breathing body that smelled of nothing worse than mud, and wet leaves, and tobacco smoke.

‘’Tis but I,’ came the calm quiet voice of my friend. Never was it more welcome! ‘I must see, if only for a moment! Try another match, my dear fellow, if you would.’

So violently did my hands tremble, I feared to snap the thing in two. Was I more afraid of darkness—or of what the light might show? I prayed to all the forbidden gods, to Ra, to Apollo, to Freyr, Surya, Lucifer—but for what I know not. Perhaps my prayers were answered: the match caught. I held it up. Though the surrounding darkness seemed to clot around the little warm wavering sphere of light, the passage was indubitably empty—or at least empty of anything visible. My friend commenced a fevered jig to that infernal tune, pressing on stones of the wall, leaping up to knock on those of the ceiling. Then – sudden as a soldier stepping on a booby trap – he stilled.

A click—the piping broke off—hurried light footsteps _(my friend renewed his frantic searches)_ —a scuffle—a little choking cry—a thud—halting footsteps—another click—more halting footsteps. My own feet cleaved to the ground as if its cold stone had invaded my bones. The footsteps receded into the distance. Silence. The match winked out.

‘We could not prevent it,’ said my friend, with a terrible weariness that had naught to do with the hour. The secret entrance, if one there was, had kept its secrets. ‘Shall we retire? I have a great desire for a hot bath, if any might be procured at this hour.’ He gave that little huff of his that passed as laughter at the thought. Pistol or no, it was like to be suicide to return to the Crown.

The tunnel back to the graveyard seemed even longer in the dark. We stumbled out into the moonlight and took in great gulps of fresh air unsullied, so we thought, by any evil. But it was a night of errors and misjudgements.


	6. The Baronet

We awoke in warm beds after all. My friend even got his bath.

‘I do apologise for housing you in the servants’ quarters,’ said our host. He was one of the largest men I had ever seen. His swarthy deep-lined face, with its sunken eyes and narrow beak of a nose, bore all the signs of a lifetime of over-indulgence, and his thin white hair had the precarious look of linens boiled once too often. He held a revolver in one great meaty hand, though he looked enough the ogre that he seemed as like to beat us to death with it as to employ it in the more regular manner. ‘As you might perhaps be aware, we have a sad shortage of dry apartments for guests. Also for the poor quality of your welcome, and the early hour at which I must awaken you.’

‘You had us kidnapped!’ I cried.

‘So I did,’ he said, without a shred of embarrassment. ‘If you heard what I heard last night, as I think you must, you’ll understand the urgency. Jack Booth at the Crown is a good friend of mine—’

‘Spy, you mean!’

‘That too, when the occasion demands. And really, if you will go around impersonating men folk here know well,’ and he glared at me, ‘or playing a woman topping six feet,’ and he glared at my friend, ‘it’s as well it was a fellow as discreet as Booth who reported the matter.’

‘So you too heard piping last night,’ said my friend. The little circumstance of his interlocutor being a giant with a revolver trained on him could not have been discerned from his manner.

‘Piping, and other things. I propose we discuss the matter over breakfast. If you’ll engage not to bolt, I’ll engage not to call the constables.’

‘Capital,’ said my friend. And he actually jumped up shook hands with the ruffian! With a genial invitation to avail ourselves of the services of his valet, the man departed.

‘What are you thinking?’ I cried, the moment the door had closed. ‘That must be Sir Grimesby Roylott!’

‘I am counting on it. If he intended us harm, we would be in a cell, most likely in the Tower. He’s probably as eager to clear up this terrible matter as we are.’

‘But surely _he’s_ the murderer! Miss Stoner probably uncovered whatever foul scheme he’s concocted over her mother.’

‘Then he is playing a very deep game indeed. Deep and dangerous. But I believe that the killer – and no longer do I insist on murderer – is one of the two people we heard last night. Shall we call them the Limping Piper and the Running Woman? The latter might be a boy, I admit, but as the body will most probably be found in the library, I doubt _that_ identification will pose us too great a challenge.’ But while we were donning borrowed garments that must have been left by some age-old shooting party, for they could not belong to our giant of a jailer, my friend cautioned in an undertone, ‘Take care not to give our host any information about our good selves. He might have no very precise idea, beyond what he owned. And remember, not all beefsteaks are half-witted.’

‘I believe you can count on me not to say a word,’ was my reply.

Though I could not rid myself of the sense that Her Majesty’s guards would surely soon descend to cart us off for torture, the promised repast was excellent, and both plentiful and welcome. The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast, is that not what they say? The meal was served in a light comfortable parlour in the modern east wing that could hardly have been less doom laden. The windows overlooked a terrace and a well-kept topiary garden where peacocks strutted and displayed in the day’s first rays of sun, and rags of last night’s mist lent the strange shapes of the box trees a festive appearance. The abrupt chalk cliffs of Box Hill, that famous Surrey landmark, rose behind all like a gigantic wedding cake. Neither library nor great chamber could be seen. Smiling down at the table was a portrait of a dark-eyed beauty who must surely be the last Lady Roylott, her young daughters on her lap, a peacock by her feet echoing the simple brooch that was her only ornament, and the mansion house in the background.

Miss Stoner did not make any more material appearance at breakfast. Sir Grimesby gave his apologies for his stepdaughter, saying that she was much occupied with domestic business, the house being so short-staffed. ‘It is hard to lose a sibling,’ he added, with every appearance of sincerity. ‘They were twins, you know.’

My friend took a plate of kippers and kedgeree, and enquired, coolly, between forkfuls, ‘Whose idea was suicide, yours or the coroner’s?’

‘Colonel Jamieson’s,’ replied the baronet, with an equal assumed coolness, over his sausage and eggs. ‘I pressed for the Indians. Better them than Major Thomason, or our poor Elsie.’ I wondered what had happened to the too-pert housemaid. People taken into Her Majesty’s custody even for the most minor of offences rarely came out unchanged.

‘It did not trouble you that they are not guilty?’

‘They hid themselves tight enough while the hue and cry was on. And few men of Albion can tell one Hindoo face from another. They could have plied their trade in Winchester with impunity inside a week. And, besides, they are surely guilty of something, if only planning robbery.’

‘Why would you say that?’

I was watching Sir Grimesby closely as my friend questioned him. The huge man could not hide his temper, whether at the topic or at the impertinence of being so interrogated by one of half his years. His grip on his utensils tightened, till his fingers were white and the fork seemed to bend. He served himself another egg and slashed at the yolk. ‘Every time a band of Indians comes to Stoke Moran, on whatever pretext,’ he said, with an effort at ease, ‘there is sure to be an attempt at house-breaking.’

‘It sounds as if you are keeping something of considerable value here, Sir Grimesby,’ said my friend, lightly.

This subject did not seem to trouble the baronet. He leaned back in his chair with a tremendous creak and started to sip his coffee, which the maid had just refilled. He readily owned that there were a great many valuables in the library; indeed, he seemed inclined to boast on the subject. ‘Several of my forefathers were avid book collectors,’ he said, ‘and I believe there are many rarities. I’ve heard it claimed you will find no finer private library in Albion, on certain limited topics, though in truth we have little that’s not in the British Museum or the Queen’s Collection – and of course we can’t compete with Salem, or Arkham, or the Transylvanian archives! One of my distant ancestors is said to have been the first white man to set foot in Asia, and his journals would no doubt make fascinating reading, if one only had the key to his cipher. And in modern times, Julia – my late wife, I mean – acquired one or two Indian curios she believed were unusual, perhaps unique, along with the regular rubbish, and there’s all the detritus of her little archaeological hobby, too. Together, of course, with the usual in jewellery and plate and whatnot you may find in any house of this size and antiquity in Albion. But the thieves nearly always target the library.’

My friend’s fish was entirely forgotten. His eyes gleamed with that intensity I had seen in no other man, and it was plain that he could barely contain his enthusiasm for the wonders Sir Grimesby had trailed before us. ‘I am unwilling to spoil this pleasant repast with an account of it,’ he said, ‘but after what my friend and I heard last night, I own the library is the room I am chiefly curious to visit.’

‘Indeed! We must all get in there somehow! But it might be difficult to pull off. The doors are solid Albion oak, fully seven inches thick.’

My friend looked about him, perhaps to ascertain that the maid had left the parlour. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘you need not be coy about your secret passages with such old friends as we are!’

To my surprise, Sir Grimesby did not balk at the topic. ‘The one I know is blocked on the inside,’ he said. ‘I cannot shift it. After I heard Helen’s testimony, I realised the peculiar sound could only have come from there, and I surmised the intruder must have taken the key. But last night I stood outside the only doors, and no-one and nothing passed them. I swear it on my dear Julia’s grave.’

‘We were in the stone passage beneath the library at that time,’ said my friend, ‘and can swear likewise.’ I pushed away my plate – the food suddenly turned my stomach – and folded my chill hands around my warm coffee cup. ‘So there must be at least one other entrance,’ he continued, ‘unknown to you.’

‘There might be fifty! The old medieval half-timbered hall was encased in stone at the beginning of the last century, and the builder insisted on a gap between the old wall and the new, so the wood didn’t simply rot. I cannot squeeze in there, but a slender woman—’

‘Or a child – I see! Does the same apply to the great chamber?’

‘I believe not. That wing of the hall was falling down, and so the timbers were simply removed. Colonel Jamieson went into that in detail when he visited _in propria persona_.’

‘I must apologise for that ruse. If we had known what a warm welcome we would receive, we would never have tried it, would we, my friend?’

I muttered something appropriate – however false the baronet’s bonhomie, it was difficult to sup at a man’s table without beginning to warm to him – and used the opening to pose a question that had been puzzling me. ‘But what are all these secret passages and tunnels for?’

‘The earliest ones served the castle that was even earlier than the medieval manor. Our Queen’s glorious ascension was accepted rather less wholeheartedly than most modern sources recount, and it was not unknown for royalist households to find themselves under siege. The first Sir Arthur – who built this house in 1389, if the date over the library mantel does not lie – had a horror of assassination. And with good reason – he suffered three attacks in as many months after overseeing the purification of Hampshire. My father shared his namesake’s feelings. When he retired here from Bengal, he had the entire rabbit warren renovated. He also kept a small menagerie, and he used to let lions and tigers roam free in the grounds at night to deter intruders.’

‘Would the tunnels not be a weakness for assassins to get in?’ I enquired.

‘They used to all be booby trapped.’ Sir Grimesby must have seen the look of horror on my face because he continued hastily, ‘I stripped out all the tunnels I knew about when I inherited. But the others are unlikely to be safe for someone who does not know their secrets.’ And I had thought to suggest that my friend, for all his prodigious height, was as slender as any woman! ‘But if we are to talk further on such grisly topics – and I fear we must – we should retire somewhere the servants will not walk in on us. My stepdaughter will berate me if we lose any more staff.’ And with that he flung down his napkin and rose from the table.

As we quit the room, my friend lingered to straighten the man’s fork: he occasionally exhibits a most surprising distaste for disorder not of his own making. I seized the opportunity to whisper, ‘I don’t trust the man. Is he trying to cover up Miss Stoner’s absence? By all that’s holy, it cannot be _she_ who lies dead on the floor of that accursed library, can it?’ But my friend put his finger to his lips.

Sir Grimesby led the way across the corridor to a dim oak-panelled study and flicked on the light. From the ledgers crowding the shelves it seemed to serve as his business room. It faced the other aspect, in deep shade as the hour was still early. The view was dominated by the smooth grey stone of the library rising from the equally smooth lawn; with no windows at ground level and castellations along the parapet, it took on the look of an impregnable fortress. The baronet rang the bell. I wondered if this would prove the signal for our arrest, but it was Miss Stoner who answered. She looked sullen enough, but it was evidently not she who mouldered in the library, and I was glad of the relief.

‘No fire has been kindled in here this morning,’ complained Sir Grimesby.

‘Elsie sees to the fires,’ said Miss Stoner, in the same monotone she had employed at the beginning of her testimony yesterday. ‘She’s still in Guildford Gaol, if you recall. Jane gave notice yesterday afternoon, and refused to spend another night in the house even when I offered her ten guineas to stay another week. And Mrs Mandeville is who knows where, as ever. I can see to it, if you will.’

‘No matter. Have someone bring up some coal and leave it outside the door.’ He locked the door after her, and paused for a moment with his ear to its panels, presumably listening to her footsteps. ‘You’ll find I have good hearing for my age,’ he said, putting his back to the door. ‘I hope that satisfies you, Dr Watson.’ I made some noise of demurral, but he interrupted me. ‘You see I know who you are! Both of you! Do not bother to deny it. Mr Moriarty’s description of Mr Vernet – or whatever your true name might be – is most precise. “Six foot exactly, lean, grey eyes, sharp-featured, thin-faced, prominent forehead, hairline a little receding even though his age can be no more than twenty-eight.” You see I have it by heart.’

‘It is gratifying to be so memorable,’ said my friend, who had renounced all name save ‘Rache’ – revenge. His voice was nonchalant but his eyes ranged ceaselessly about the room. There was plenty of coal in the scuttle, and I set about the necessary business. If nothing else fire might be the best weapon we could muster, and besides the room felt decidedly chilly.

‘So I am speaking to the murderers of His Royal Highness Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia? You are completely at my mercy here, gentlemen, so we might as well be frank with each other before we go on.’

My friend seemed imperturbable. Would that I had his nerve! We were trapped in a locked first-floor room with a giant with a revolver in the Butcher of Bengal’s stronghold five miles from a station, with countless policemen out of sight only waiting for a signal to take us to the Tower!

‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘I did it! I killed the half-blood monster! I slashed his thorax with my knives and I bathed in his inhuman green blood until there was no more left and I would do it again if I had to. He was a monstrosity not for his green blood or his extra eye or his mandibular tentacles but for his monstrous acts and the malignant glee in his three hearts. We bear witness to his leaving a swath of children across the capitals of Europe so maddened that they could not look at their own reflections without trying to tear their eyes from their sockets. If we stood witness to that and let the creature live we would be as monstrous as he. And now do what you will, for my only regret is that I was not quicker.’

‘And I planned the half-blood’s execution for his crimes,’ said my friend, with an unnatural calm, ‘and held him down while the good doctor carried out the sentence. His blood stains my breast also. I will only add, my friend’s tender feelings do not permit him to rehearse half the creature’s foul acts to which we both bear witness.’

‘Then I shake you both by the hand, gentlemen,’ said our jailer. And the man actually came forward and did just that! In one great leap of hope I noticed that he had left the key behind in the door. ‘And thank you for your frankness,’ he continued. ‘I hope I might be equally frank with you, in my turn. And I hope you both will forgive me my little test. I had to be sure. That cunning devil Moriarty has tried to trap me before. I can reassure you that the only man in Stoke Moran to suspect you is my friend Booth. He is a clever man and has no doubt formed his own opinions, but I’ve told him you are Mr Moriarty and Major Moran, here by my invitation to investigate these matters.’ And at this my friend laughed outright for once. ‘If he takes it into his head to try to collect the bounty on you both, why then there are escape routes from this house that even he does not know. And now perhaps you’ll join me in a brandy to steady our nerves.’ His hands shook as he lifted the decanter, and a few drops spilled onto the sideboard.

‘I will need a clear head to tease out this puzzle,’ said my friend. ‘But I believe the good doctor is in need of some fortification. His nerves were sorely tried last night.’ And he handed me a glass, waved me to an armchair beside the fire and settled in one himself, for all the world as if we were snug in our old lodgings on Montague Street and not in the house of our enemy! ‘Drink up, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘I assure you – both of you – the danger is over until tonight. Now, Sir Grimesby, I believe you have some information that you wish to impart.’

 


	7. The Long Shadow

The baronet downed his brandy and poured another. He placed the glass on the mantel and came to stand between the two of us, with his back to the fire. Under the cold incandescent light that flooded the room his sun-baked face seemed grey, and his wrinkles yawned like chasms. ‘There is much that I believe—nay, dread—might lurk at the heart of these awful happenings,’ he said. ‘But it’s hard to know what is important and what is not.’ He turned to look at my friend. ‘I believe I should leave it to your judgement, sir.’

‘You may safely do so,’ my friend assured him.

‘But where to begin?’ Sir Grimesby fortified himself with a few sips of brandy, and when at length he started to speak, rather than addressing either of us he seemed to direct his words towards the windows, as if his audience were the library squatting without, or its sinister nocturnal visitors. ‘I believe I must take you back to a young officer fresh out of Cambridge,’ he said, ‘who arrived in his childhood home of Calcutta in the summer of ’50. My father, after his successful campaign at Bharatpur, had been promoted to governor, and we lived in fine style in the Royal Compound, where all the officer’s wives also put up. One in particular haunted the governor’s residence, and I came to see much of her. The lady was, of course, Mrs Henry Stoner, the young and beautiful wife of a halfwit of a major-general who always seemed to find himself allocated to duties far from the city. I soon came to realise that she and my father were … intimate. The circumstance did not give me a disgust of the lady, rather the converse. My mother, the Grimesby heiress, had long been an invalid. It was said the tropical climate did not suit her constitution, but in truth she’d have been confined to an asylum were it not for her wealth and her family’s ancient name. Mrs Stoner was far from my father’s first mistress. When she fell pregnant—let me just say, I fear Helen and her sister might have a nearer connection to me than stepdaughter. The girls never had the least suspicion, and I pray I might never have to tell Helen, for she holds her father to be a hero and mine the very worst of monsters.

‘And then the Queen made her state visit to the Continent. I served in the governor’s honour guard, and I glimpsed Her for the first time the day she arrived in Calcutta. My father introduced me to Her the following day. She touched me.’ He shuddered, and took a gulp of brandy before going on. ‘If you’ve ever met one of Them face to face you will understand – and if not then no words can convey the experience. And then of course came Chittagong. If the Queen at her most condescending was horrifying—’ This time he downed the glass. His hands trembled so violently when he refilled it that most of the liquor doused the sideboard.

‘And then She departed for Albion. My father took me and some hand-picked men to Chittagong. We arrived at the city by boat in the dead of night. In Calcutta there was noise at all hours but here all was quiet, deathly quiet. The commander of the local garrison – or rather his second, for the commander had committed suicide – must have instituted a curfew, and even the frogs and cicadas observed it. I was there when my father gave the order for the massacre. At first I didn’t think to question it, and even now I wonder what choice he really had—’

‘He ordered the massacre of every man, woman and child in the city!’ The words burst out of me. How could he defend that monster!

‘And if he had not, the Queen might well have ordered the death of every soul in Bengal! She would not even have done it in anger, rather as the HM Inspector might order a herd of cattle with the pest culled to prevent its spread to neighbouring herds. I thought later he might have sent couriers ahead with the orders so that anyone who could might flee the city. But perhaps he didn’t think of that at the time. He’d been closeted for over an hour with Her Majesty before we set out. Two days later I was still sick and trembling simply from Her passage past me as She left. In any event, I found myself drafted to carrying out the order, or at least to supervising the men who carried it out. You’ll think me a toper,’ he said, taking another great gulp from his glass, ‘but there’s not enough brandy in France to drown the memories of those three days.

‘When I returned to Calcutta you can imagine I was a different man from the one I’d been when I arrived. I conceived a horror of anything Indian – could hardly look at a brown face without seeing—well, I’m sure you can imagine. My father was busy rounding up the “ringleaders” and Stoner was conveniently at hand. To this day, I have no idea if he was involved, or if he was framed by someone. Many of the men’s families were quietly executed. I was packing to get the next boat out when Julia – Mrs Stoner – came to me with a great big carpet bag in her arms and the two babes with their nurse and begged me to save their lives. She called my father a heartless ogre, and implored me on her knees to take them all to Albion. I was flattered. She was … grateful on the boat, and we were married the day we landed in Portsmouth.’

Sir Grimesby abandoned his glass and strode over to the window. He stared out with a trace of a smile playing across his craggy features, as if the warm spring sunshine beginning to graze the lawn below had brought his young and beautiful wife back to life, and she was smiling up at him. ‘I loved her, of course,’ he said, ‘with all that aching passion of a young man’s first love. I don’t know how long it took me to put together little things I’d overheard in Calcutta with what marriage taught me of my wife’s character, and of the Restorationist sympathies she no longer troubled to conceal in private. Several years. But one day it dawned on me that my dear Julia must have been the brains behind the Chittagong Plot. The babies’ nurse—’

‘Permit me to guess,’ interjected my friend, who had been listening to all this with rapt attention. ‘One Miss Smith.’

‘That might have been her name, yes.’

‘Don’t gratify him by asking how he does that,’ I said. ‘It only goes to that great head of his.’

‘A thin, drab, forgettable woman. I suppose they make the best spies – for I believe it to have been she who passed on the information that Julia extracted from my father.’

‘Did you ever charge them with it?’ asked my friend.

‘Julia and I never spoke of what had happened. The nurse, whatever her name was, left not very long after the twins were weaned. Julia’s precious carpet bag proved to be packed with trinkets that she or Stoner had picked up during their years in India – that peacock brooch she always wore among them. She loved peacocks. I shut up the rest in cabinets in the library, got a man in to catalogue it all, and never set foot in the place if I could help it. Julia took up archaeology, conceived a passion for our family history, and spent hours in the library. She even started digging up what she believed to be the site of the old castle keep. For twenty years I believe we were as content as two people roped together by such bitter circumstance could hope to be.’ Here the baronet stopped, as if he wished to linger in that long-spent happiness.

When he resumed his voice was harsh. ‘And then in ’74 my father retired from public life, and took up permanent residence with us here.’ He turned his back on the window and for the first time in his long narrative, he faced the two of us by the fire. Not a shred of a smile remained on his face. ‘He too had been altered by Chittagong. It magnified qualities he’d already shown, and the perpetual threat of assassination had made him a paranoiac. I’d thought that Julia would not have been able to bear being in the same room as the man. I could not. I had these rooms in what was then a service wing fitted out so I could avoid him. But she soon resumed some of her old intimacy with him.’

‘And so you became jealous,’ I suggested.

‘Jealous!’ He gave a great peal of laughter. I believe so much brandy so early in the day must have gone to his head. ‘Terrified she must be cooking up some new plot! She had the great chamber redecorated with that hideous peacock scheme, and took to needling my father about the first Sir Arthur having entertained the Queen here.’

‘You believe her to have been planning another assassination attempt,’ said my friend.

‘I suspected it, yes. But what she had in mind, of that I had not the slightest inkling. I still don’t. Yet I fear it must somehow be connected with what has happened here this week.’

‘And your father died in 1877,’ said my friend. ‘Succumbed to his wounds after being mauled by a tiger, I believe.’ He exchanged a long look with Sir Grimesby. The baronet dropped his eyes first. ‘Well, I cannot imagine the old man was a great loss. And then your wife last year – how did the papers put it, “a tragic railway accident.” And yet she is not interred in your family vault.’

‘She did take her own life, yes.’ At this Sir Grimesby sprang away from the window, and so vigorously did he stride towards us, I feared he intended some violence to my impertinent friend. Instead he started to pace up and down the room, as if his passions were too aroused to permit him to rest even for a moment. ‘But that is not why her grave lies where it does,’ he said. ‘I vowed I’d never bury another Roylott where my father’s bones are interred. The spot I chose is the furthest possible in the graveyard from the family chapel.’ It dawned on me that the desolate grave we had happened upon last night must belong to Lady Roylott and not to her daughter, and a dim foreboding of some horror I could not quite comprehend crept over me.

‘And did you chance to witness the tragedy?’ enquired my friend.

‘Ah, so you have heard the village gossip that I murdered her!’ Another peal of that mad laughter burst from his lips. ‘Of course you have! And so I did, in a way.’

I leaped from my chair with a cry. Here was the confession we had awaited! But my friend restrained me. ‘Quiet, you fool!’ he hissed.

But the baronet continued as if nothing had occurred to interrupt him. ‘Some time after my father’s accident, Julia became … unhinged. She raved, and what she said could not be said in public, not even by a Roylott. Much of it was sheer nonsense, laced with Restorationist slogans and the like. Her delvings in the family tree bore strange fruit. She called the family evil and accursed, took to muttering darkly about our surfeit of Sir Arthurs. She even dredged up that old tale my father used to tell at the Feast of Ascension, if he’d had enough brandy, that some Dark-Age Roylott had called forth the Queen from the Deeps! She took to spouting nonsense words, and she raved on and on about some “Dweller on the Threshold,” saying “He would set all right when He came.” She said that over and over.’

My friend, normally the most rational of men, had listened to all this poppycock with the most exquisite attention. Never had I seen him so enthralled. ‘Are you sure those were her exact words?’ he asked, eagerly. ‘With that emphasis?’

‘They were queer enough, I grant you. But she said them over and over as if they made some kind of strange sense – and perhaps they did, to her. The alienists tell us the delusions seem quite real to the deluded – though of course I could not have her treated. In the end her wits seemed completely lost. With the example of my mother before me, I did not want to have her confined. I locked up the accursed library – which had seemed to exacerbate her mania – banned all visitors lest they heard something they could not ignore, and strictly forbade her to leave the house without someone to keep her in check. She could not bear it. She persuaded the housekeeper to drive her to Leatherhead, on pretext of buying a new gown—and she threw herself under the express to London.’ The baronet’s pacing had taken him back to the fire, and he fortified himself with another swig of what was plainly his habitual medicine. Grief overspread his face. The emotion seemed quite genuine, but I had seen my friend act the grieving widower so convincingly that all the ladies of the audience, and not a few of the men, shed real tears.

‘So it was your housekeeper, not you, who witnessed the event?’ asked my friend.

‘Yes, Mrs Mandeville. She was most terribly affected.’ My friend enquired whether she had been with the family long. ‘A few years, at the most,’ replied the baronet. ‘I let go some of my father’s staff after he died, and others left us.’

Now my friend rose from his seat to join Sir Grimesby in standing by the fire. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, as gently as if he were talking to a woman, ‘but are you quite sure it was your wife who was killed?’

I did not understand to what end these questions tended. If the baronet had secreted his wife away for some nefarious purpose, he must be a man so steeped in evil he would hardly own his guilt under so little provocation! But if – as I was beginning to suspect – my friend had acquitted him of evil-doing, his questions seemed to rake over events best left to moulder undisturbed.

‘Colonel Jamieson called me to identify the remains, what little there was,’ said the baronet, and for all his huge bulk the man looked as feeble as a child. It was a grim enough task when the person had been the comrade-at-arms of a few weeks or months. How would I feel if called upon to identify my dearest friend? ‘The head had been severed and thrown clear,’ he said, blankly. ‘There could be no doubt.’

‘I do not mean to be ghoulish, but are you certain, absolutely certain, that you were not fooled by a wax model?’

I recalled that we had employed something of the sort to great effect when we performed the scene at the end of _A Tale of Two Traitors_ where Carton and Darnay are guillotined side by side – we did that with mirrors – for attempting to deceive Her Majesty’s justice.

‘So you have seen her too!’ the baronet cried, and he grasped my friend by the shoulders with those great hands of his, as if he wanted to pick him up and dance about the room with him. ‘I thought my wits must surely have been turned by all this sorrow—for last night, I saw my dear Julia’s ghost walk!’

 


	8. The Gathering Storm

Last night was not the first occasion upon which the baronet believed he had seen his lady’s ghost, as my friend’s probing swiftly elucidated. He had glimpsed her on five occasions in all, through the upper windows of the west wing or in the gardens, the first on the Windesday before his stepdaughter’s death. At first he ascribed his visions to the brandy. It was when he saw her sober that he feared for his wits.

‘And with reason,’ I said, after my friend had despatched the man on some quest, ‘for even with his colossal frame, his habitual consumption must have an effect on his brain.’

‘I imagine it has the effect of dulling, not exacerbating, his nervous condition,’ said my friend. ‘Do not judge! We may come to join him before this episode is through. If it were just the testimony of a drunken widower! But three people have now claimed to see the ghost of Julia Roylott walk these grounds within the past twelve days – and not all of the three are drunk, delusional or credulous. Coupled with the other circumstances, the cat, the grave—’ Just then the church clock chimed ten. ‘We have so little time!’ he cried. ‘We cannot afford to waste a single moment!’ And deaf to all my entreaties for enlightenment, he packed me off with the queerest list of questions imaginable, to speak to those few servants who remained in the house.

It was nearly a quarter to midday when I returned. ‘What took you so long?’ my friend enquired. He was seated cross-legged – his shoes coated with mud, his hands black with newsprint, black streaks on his chin and cheeks, his hair all on end – in the middle of the study floor, surrounded on all sides by a wall of paper, like a child playing at forts. There were maps and plans, books and bills, letters and ledgers, catalogues, account books, newspapers, and even what looked like old architectural drawings. The lacy appearance of the _Guildford Gazette_ showed he had been busy taking extracts. ‘Go on, go on!’ he cried, with the greatest urgency. ‘Your report!’

I tried to organise the odd jottings of my notes into a proper report, but the facts he had asked me to elicit were too peculiar and ill-assorted: there was no logic to them but the logic of madness. But it was madness we were dealing with, and these were mad times. ‘The cook is a relic of Sir Arthur’s time,’ I began. ‘She and the housekeeper have plainly been at loggerheads for years. The housekeeper always eats in her room, she says. She used to take soup, cutlets, white fish and the occasional roast partridge, but over the past couple of weeks she has ordered rare beefsteaks, beef sausage and black pudding every night.’

‘That tallies with the butcher’s bills.’

‘The cook thinks she must be going through the change—’

‘The list, my good fellow, keep to the list!’

I referred to my notes. ‘Neither she nor the scullery maid keep any precise tally of the milk. Anyone with a key might draw from the stillroom churn. The scullery maid says the kitchen cat is a big black tom without a white hair on him. He was last seen the Starsday week before Miss Stoner died. She is certain of the date. She said she would generally not have worried as he often disappears for a few days, except that there was a big storm that Deepsday night – apparently the cat’s terrified of lightning and comes in without fail. The cook corroborated this, broadly, though she said she detested the cat, which always had an evil look—’

‘I see now why it took you so long! Go on, go on! The furnace, what of the furnace?’

‘The young housemaid rotting in Guildford, poor soul, had the most to do with the furnace. The under-gardener also sees to it, but he checks it just once a week on Deepsday, the only day it’s allowed to go out. Elsie – that’s the unfortunate housemaid – called him in on the 25th, ironically a Fireday, because it was out. He swears the thing was cold as the grave and had been swept completely clean. They usually only bother to do that in midsummer and – being a superstitious lot, like servants the Empire over – would never dream of doing it on a Fireday. None of the other servants could account for it. The man – now this is off your hymn sheet, but I thought it might be to the point – also got dragged in the Monday following to rod the old drains under the central wing. He thinks the cat – which had an appetite for rats – might have got stuck in them and drowned, causing a blockage and what he called “the most appalling stench,” like nothing he’d ever smelled before. I thought to ask if he could say whether the smell might be corpse like, but he said he did a bit of grave-digging and pall-bearing for the extra crowns, and it was nothing like.’

‘Good work! Monday the 28th, you say. I take it the cat was not found? No?’ And my friend made an annotation on a large sheet of paper he had weighted with the empty decanter. It was covered with similar annotations in three different colours of ink. ‘Once we have assembled everything out of the ordinary over these past two or three weeks, then we might profitably look for patterns.’

‘Just for once, my friend,’ I begged, ‘allow yourself to theorise in advance of all the facts. This is life, not your damned cosmology!’

‘I am very much afraid,’ he said, solemnly, ‘we will find the two to be inextricably tangled in this case. Pray continue! Is this gardener’s account to be trusted?’

‘The man might have been exaggerating about the smell. He seemed particularly aggrieved to be called inside again when the gardeners have all been rushed off their feet clearing up the mess left by the Deepsday storm. He claimed that was the worst since the Great Gale of ’71, and felled more than thirty trees in the park. He swore it was unnatural – they all seemed to have fallen in neat concentric circles. That was not quite how he put it, but I’m sure that was what he meant.’

‘I congratulate him. He’s an observant man. That is exactly how they appeared to me.’ So that was how my friend had got all the mud on his shoes! He drew my attention to a plan of the park with dozens of crosses joined by neat concentric circles inscribed in red. The mansion house lay at the exact centre. One was inexorably reminded of a target – or perhaps a pebble dropped into a still pool. ‘The local rag also dubs it the “storm of the decade,” he said. ‘It places the loss of trees at “almost fifty, including several noble examples of such great antiquity as to make a sad loss to our historic county”—you know how they like to go on. But the only one it troubles to describe is the five-hundred-year-old Jubilee Oak in Stoke Moran village, here’ – and he tapped his map – ‘which tradition says the first Sir Arthur planted in 1376 for Her Majesty’s bicentenary. The tree planted by his namesake for the septcentenary, here, in the park, was also a casualty, but that was a mere sapling and might not signify. The paper has a picture.’

‘Of the tree?’

‘No, of the first Sir Arthur. Look!’ He brandished one of his collection of clippings. ‘Is that not suggestive?’ But there was nothing out of the common about the drawing. A big man – all the Roylott men were giants – dressed in doublet and hose, with the Queen’s Eye blazoned on his chest. The spade in his hand sat ill with the sword by his side, and a bloodthirsty look in his eyes that the artist had somehow managed to convey in a few lines. ‘Does it not remind you of anyone?’ My friend covered the body with his hand. If one ignored the antique arrangement of the hair, it could be a picture of the Arthur who died not four years since. An equestrian statue of the man stood opposite the British Museum, and I had passed it almost every day when we lodged in Montague Street. ‘You see it!’ he cried.

‘The artist must have modelled the features on the modern man.’

‘Perhaps. We must find a contemporary portrait – or at least one completed before the birth of the latest baronet to bear that terrible name.’

But when the present baronet returned weighed down with still more papers, he could not oblige our curiosity. ‘After my father’s bloody end, I could not bear the way his portrait’s eyes seemed to follow me about, and the lips seemed parted to accuse me. I had the thing hung in the library with the rest of our rogues’ gallery – including the only attested portrait of his namesake to survive.’

‘The library again!’ cried my friend, with the air of a man foiled at every turn by some cunning enemy. It was if the room housed a consciousness as subtle and malign as our enemy Moriarty! ‘Do you have any idea what the Indians might be seeking in there?’

‘If I knew what it was they were after, I’d make them a present of it just to see the back of them! But did nothing from the catalogue strike you?’ The baronet extracted a heavy volume that had been propping up a tower of newspapers in Fort Rache’s southwest corner. A landslide ensued, and my friend was persuaded to exchange his seat on the floor for safer terrain by the fire, long now extinct.

‘Your wife’s brooch has an interesting design,’ he said, opening the volume at a scrap of foolscap that seemed to serve him as a bookmark, ‘a peacock feather with the eye struck through horizontally—almost as if the eye were closed…’ And I could see from his vacant look – as if he walked on some other world, veiled from the rest of us – that my friend was thinking furiously. ‘You say she habitually wore it?’

‘Yes, always. I thought to bury her with it, but Helen begged it from me as a memento. Her sister had a lock of hair made into a mourning bracelet.’

‘Interesting! Most interesting! I should very much like to examine it, if Miss Stoner were willing. I think it very likely that it saved her life, and perhaps her mother’s also. And here is an Indian pipe, described as a late-eighteenth-century _pungi_ , or nose-flute, that is not so very different from the one our Hindoo friend was entertaining us with last night. Do you not agree, my friend?’ And he handed the catalogue to me, open at a page that did indeed depict a somewhat similar instrument. One could see a dozen like it on the streets of Bombay on any evening stroll, though the art of playing them in the traditional fashion seemed to have been forgotten.

I thumbed through the pages. Despite the long words, minutely detailed sketches and handsome binding, it seemed a rather commonplace collection. I had owned a few not dissimilar items myself before we embraced this peripatetic life. There were certainly no golden Buddhas or diadems studded with emeralds the size of hen’s eggs to attract so relentless a pursuit. How had that blind old fakir put it? ‘More precious than gold, more precious even than the finest emeralds.’ I had by now reached that part of the volume cataloguing the fruits of the lady’s archaeological enthusiasm, but I continued turning the leaves to occupy my hands while my mind revolved the man’s words. Lady Roylott had certainly been a diligent hobbyist. There were pages and pages of old silver coins, some from the Dark Ages without our Queen’s head, as well as pottery shards, animal bones, a black bit of leather that might once have been a sandal, and items of even less general interest.

The last page seemed to have been bound out of order. It showed a statuette, some eight inches high, of an old Hindoo goddess, with ten arms, ten legs, twenty breasts, ten of her own heads and the heads of her hundred enemies strung on a garland. Serpents writhed about her feet, a mass of hair coiled snake-like over her torso, and the whole figure was wreathed in flames. The base was covered in characters in no alphabet I knew. The rubric tentatively identified the goddess as Kali, described the material as black soapstone, gave the date simply as “ancient,” and owned the author’s failure at translating the inscription, or even identifying its language. But the find was dated to 1877, some twenty-five years after Lady Roylott returned from India. And it seemed as if Sir Arthur’s death that year must have put a stop to her explorations, for it was her final one.

‘This is rather odd, my friend.’ I passed the volume back to him. ‘Look at the date it was found.’

The effect on my friend was as if Dr Galvani had passed a bolt of electricity through his body. For several minutes he failed to say a word, and then he could hardly speak fast enough. Indeed, his words fell out so fast at first they sounded like nonsense syllables. When at last he got some control of his limbs and tongue, he shook my hand so vigorously I thought he might detach it. ‘My good doctor, you are a miracle worker!’ he cried. ‘Now everything falls into place! And this was truly found in Albion?’

‘It came out of that big pit my wife had dug on top of Box Hill,’ said the baronet. ‘Where she claimed the old keep once stood.’ My friend’s excitement plainly put the man at a loss, and truly it was extreme enough to disconcert even me, who had witnessed his fits of energy before.

‘Then the family legend that one of your forebears was the first European to visit Asia might hold some vestige of truth,’ said my friend. ‘For whatever it might be, it is indubitably alien to Albion.’

‘You think _this_ is what the Indians have been seeking?’ I asked. ‘And the Roylott the old man spoke of was not Lady Roylott at all?’

‘I do,’ said my friend. He turned to the baronet and enquired, urgently, ‘Where is the thing now? Tell me it is safe here, and not in some Royal Collection.’

‘It’s safe enough – the library safe.’ Sir Grimesby laughed at his mild pun. ‘The man who catalogued it said it might be valuable, though I can’t see why. It’s one of the most hideous things I’ve ever laid eyes on! The stone’s nothing special, either. Nasty greasy stuff.’

‘The library, the library, always the library! Everything comes back to the library! We _must_ find a way into the place!’

 


	9. The Library

Military history teaches us that even the most impregnable of fortresses has its weak spot. The library windows were high and barred; its walls and doors could not be breached; the passage beneath its floor was blocked; the location of the entrance used by my friend’s ‘Limping Piper’ and ‘Running Woman’ remained obscure – and, in any case, we could not risk it being mined against the unwary. That left only the roof. The library supplemented the meagre light of its lofty windows with an octagonal roof lantern, and though it seemed, from our lowly viewpoint, too small to be of service, the plans showed its panes to be five feet high and rather over a foot in width. Any man, save the gigantic baronet, might enter that way! Ropes were speedily obtained, and Sir Grimesby volunteered to act as our belay. But when the party assembled by the attic window that gave access to the rooves, it had gained an additional member.

Miss Stoner had taken to men’s apparel for the venture, her mother’s brooch at her neck the only concession to her sex. The lady stood almost as tall as I did and – if I might indulge what my friend is apt to call my foolish taste for the fantastic – the pale streaks in her dark hair lent her something of the look of a moonlit tiger, an impression only assisted by her expression. The height and danger she disdained, and she was not to be dissuaded by her stepfather’s direct command, nor my friend’s cool appraisal of the awful sights within, nor even my gentler remonstrances to consider the outrage to her feminine nature.

‘If my feminine nature has not been sufficiently outraged by being robbed in one year of both mother and sister by foul murder,’ she said, with a glare at Sir Grimesby that showed where the lady placed the burden of guilt, ‘I suspect it will survive the assault.’

‘You believe your mother to have been murdered,’ said my friend. ‘Is that an intuition of your heart, or a rational belief based on any particular information?’

‘Both,’ she declared. ‘My heart tells me my mother’s mood that day was content. There were days on which she raved and screamed and beat her hands against the walls of what she called her prison. But there were others when she could take delight in the views that Box Hill affords over the county, or even in small domestic matters – she often spent long hours closeted with Mrs Mandeville, and seemed invigorated by it. My head tells me no suicide stops before the act to buy a hat. On the day of her death she was measured at Mrs Long’s on Bridge Street, purchased twelve yards of crimson cashmere, two and a half of blue-and-yellow plaid and eighteen buttons for them to make her up a walking dress, and took away a hat trimmed to match. I had it all from Mrs Long herself after the funeral.’

‘She wanted paying, no doubt,’ said my friend.

‘She seemed much struck by the tragedy of spending so much on a dress that no-one would ever wear, for she said she’d made the ugly thing up that afternoon, before she heard of the supposed accident.’ I ventured to suggest that it might in truth have been an accident. ‘It was as much an accident as my father’s death,’ was her blunt rejoinder, and she added, with another black look at the baronet, ‘Either of them.’

The church clock tolled out another hour. So forcibly did my friend make the case for setting out without further waste of time that no objection was raised when the lady joined us in climbing through the window – and in truth her light feet and elegant carriage were well suited to our rooftop expedition. My friend insisted on entering the library first. Miss Stoner seemed less fearful of the dark descent than of remaining alone on the roof with her stepfather, and so I found myself the last to be lowered into the black heart of what that lady had so memorably dubbed ‘this house of evil.’ The lazy circuit in which I revolved as I descended afforded me a close view of the ornate timbers of the hammerbeam roof. Amongst the usual quatrefoils and whatnot, curious bosses, like wooden gargoyles, decorated its great soaring trusses: the Queen’s Eye, the daisy I recognised from the Roylott coat of arms, and other more disturbing forms that mingled spiders and centipedes, sea anemones and dragons, eyes and wings and hideous claws and great toothed maws, and the occasional all-too-human face and limbs—and all with no heed paid to anatomical or any other sense. Few were the portrayals – in these modern, civilised times – of the unveiled forms of our esteemed Royal Families, but my friend had shown me the old books and one could not mistake them.

It was a relief to escape the surveillance of those unsettling shapes. Safe on the ground one could convince oneself they were merely flowers or foliage or swags of fruit, that the distortions were from the odd shadows cast by the curving beams, or were just a trick of perspective. The library’s lamps had not yet been kindled. Shafts of sunlight from the upper tier only dimly penetrated the huge space, faltering before they reached us, as if the darkness of the place were too ingrained, too black for mere sun to banish. Last night’s icy chill lingered still. My friend entreated Miss Stoner and I not to move so much as a finger while he danced about the floor in his shirt sleeves and stockings, no doubt looking for traces in the dust which lay so thick over all that it was evident the servants had been telling the exact truth when they claimed never to have entered the place. Only when my friend was satisfied did he allow Miss Stoner to set a match to the wall-lanterns. One by one, the circles of warm light breathed life into the Roylott men of old, till thirteen variations on that thin-nosed face peered down at us like vultures waiting patiently for their meal to expire.

But the library’s full horror did not reveal itself until my friend thought to light the grand central chandelier, suspended from the massive age-blackened baulks of the roof itself. From it hung what must be the unlucky kitchen cat. Its head was downwards and its throat had been slit. The blood was daubed in a pattern of triangles and circles, now part obscured, within a great circle swept clean of dust. To one who knew my friend as I did, his face showed him to have prepared himself for this sight before we ever entered this evil room. We cut the poor animal down, and I could not help reflecting, as we did so, that the blood seemed to trace the pattern of the green and white marble tiles of the floor—and that the four sturdy chains supporting the chandelier might support a rather greater weight than a cat.

Across the boundary of the swept circle sprawled a dark and bulky hump. My friend must have covered the Running Woman’s corpse with his coat. I knelt to place the remains of the black cat beside the human body, and turned back the makeshift pall. The face unmasked proved to belong to the first inhabitant of this cursed house we had set eyes on: the housekeeper. _She_ was the Running Woman? Colourless in life, she seemed yet more so in death. My friend joined me on the floor – and at his shoulder, most unfortunately, Miss Stoner. For all her fierce courage, she could not suppress a little inarticulate cry at the sight, and walked a little way into the stacks to conceal her face.

‘Mrs Mandeville,’ said my friend. ‘Or should I say “Miss Smith,”’ he added in a meditative undervoice, as if talking to himself, ‘for almost certainly she was never married. And whilst it is not the case that brains and beauty are ne’er united in the female sex’ – and I knew he was thinking of the woman known to the world only as ‘Medea,’ whose audacious execution of the half-blood Crown Prince Wilhelm of Bohemia had been an inspiration for our own act of rebellion – ‘I am myself convinced that Miss Smith played at least as great a role as her mistress in their long partnership. And long it was! I suspect we should find, if we asked the maiden aunt, that their girlhood lady’s maid also bore that oh-so-forgettable name. You see, my dear fellow, how I have taken your advice to heart! I wonder, was there ever a sister to be oh-so-conveniently dying when the housekeeper needed to be out of the house? Or was it like a production of _Comedy of Errors_ upon the stage of life?’ I had no idea what he was talking about, and said as much. ‘Two twins, played by a single actor,’ he explained. ‘Miss Smith the children’s nurse leaves,’ and he raised his left hand, ‘Miss Smith the village spinster arrives,’ and he switched to raise his right hand, ‘and when Sir Arthur is safely dead Miss Smith the housekeeper returns under the name Mrs Mandeville – man devil, perhaps? – but the spinster persona she’s established proves too useful to abandon. I don’t insist upon it, but it has a certain appeal, do you not think? There is nothing so invisible as an unattractive and impoverished spinster past the age of marriage – and with the wealthy beauty to distract the eye, she could slip about quietly doing whatever was needed. It is a pity neither of us was born a woman! But whatever could have caused two such close associates to fall out? For fall out I believe they must have, at the station the day Julia Roylott met her end.’ And he fell silent, his fit of candour exhausted. ‘You’d best examine the body now while Miss Stoner is composing herself,’ was all he would add.

But the lady rejoined us while I was unbuttoning the corpse’s bodice. ‘Is that really necessary?’ she enquired, disgust plain in her tone. ‘Even I can tell the poor woman is beyond any help save our prayers.’

‘I’m a doctor, ma’am,’ I said, and then cursed myself for my vanity. Sir Grimesby had told the servants I was Moriarty’s lapdog Major Moran, and he was no medical man. It was not even true: I had never succeeded in establishing a practice after my discharge from the army. It seemed I could abandon bed, hearth, books and any hope of honourable marriage – I could even leave behind my name – but it galled to be mistaken for some ghoulish thrill-seeker, or worse.

‘Surely you can see,’ said my friend, ‘that we must establish whether she died from the same cause as your sister.’

Miss Stoner seemed struck by this. She knelt, by way of reparation, to help me with the buttons. ‘Women die as often as men,’ she said, when I tried to suggest some more womanly task, ‘and often earlier by far. It was guilt that overcame me just now – not shock or, I fear, sorrow – for only this morning I cursed the sad lady’s soul for leaving me alone in these straits.’

‘By then her soul had long departed,’ said my friend.

What she and I found, when we eased aside the undergarments, startled us both – though not, I thought, the better information of my friend: ragged wounds like an animal bite to the left side of her neck, and neater cuts to the forearms and in the crook of the elbows, where the cephalic and median cubital veins run close beneath the skin. Vampirism! In Surrey! I could not believe it. My friend, with silent pressure of his fingers, drew my attention to the undoubted fact that most of the wounds to the arms had been made several days _ante mortem_.

‘You did not see this with your sister?’ I enquired.

‘Not at all!’ she cried. ‘And Colonel Jamieson examined her most carefully, suspecting some venomous bite or sting. Sir Arthur – may his name rot – liked dangerous creatures of all sizes. He once showed the poor Colonel a tank of scorpions, and joked that he used them in the little traps he liked to set for the villagers.’

I feared it was no joke, and saw that she did too. ‘The blizzards this winter would surely have carried off any survivors,’ I said. It was not true – I had once treated a sting in a man who had not shaken his bedroll at Kushan Pass in the Indian Caucasus, with a thick blanket of snow on the ground – but it seemed to reassure her. ‘Which of the portraits shows him?’ I enquired, thinking to divert her attention while my friend, who was engaged in measuring the corpse’s feet, carried out any less-palatable investigations he might deem necessary.

Miss Stoner led me to one hanging from the great oak screen that guarded the equally great oak doors of the library’s single entrance. ‘It was painted before he went out to India,’ she said, ‘when he was only a Captain. I suppose that he must have been younger than I am.’ And she could not repress her shudder.

I could see why Sir Grimesby had shut the portrait away. The thing was almost photographic in its attention to detail, but lacked a photograph’s stilted pose. So life-like did the young man in the Queen’s uniform seem it was as if his eyes met ours, and with an expression of such ancient malevolence as I had before seen only in Drago, after I had fatally wounded him. I took an involuntary step backwards—but still those eyes locked on mine, I could swear it! It must have been the crude forms some medieval carpenter had carved upon the screen, which seemed to writhe and seethe the moment one’s eyes left them.

I wrenched my eyes away. ‘And where is his namesake?’ I asked.

‘Which namesake?’ And she pointed out three more distinguished Arthurs – a lord-chancellor on the gallery above, a general on the north wall, an admiral on the south wall – before naming the house-builder whose portrait occupied the place of honour, flanking the coat of arms on the grand chimneypiece opposite. ‘It is a family tradition that a Roylott named Arthur is sure to succeed in whatever field he chooses,’ she said. ‘But I suppose the unsuccessful ones are simply forgotten. And so many names are like enough to Arthur that they might be counted in the tally should one choose. The late baronet liked to number his antecedents as six, including Arthgen, who is said to have built the original castle, and the Dark-Age explorer and mystic who signed his writings “Arcturus.” But that’s sheer numerology.’

With the different fashions in hair and dress and style of painting, and making due allowance for a strong family resemblance, it was hard to be certain, but I thought all seven as alike as if they had been twins!

 


	10. The Books

‘There is nothing of value in the safe,’ announced my friend. He was surrounded by manuscripts illuminated with gold leaf, cunningly carved jade chess sets and ivory figurines, gold goblets studded with sapphires or inlaid with lapis lazuli, and like pieces, any one of which might have paid our passage to somewhere our descriptions would not be known, with enough to spare for bribes that one might be passably hopeful of not being turned in. Neither the little soapstone statue nor the snake-charmer’s pipe could be found, nor was there anything that might conceivably be described as an emerald band.

The two of us were now alone in the library – Miss Stoner having been drafted to assist her stepfather in carrying away the body of the Running Woman, after we had shifted the bookcase blocking the under-floor passage – and I begged my friend to explain what he had deduced of the identity of the Limping Piper.

‘Only you, my dear doctor, could have endured so much and remained so innocent! The despoiled grave, the swept furnace, the missing cat, the unnatural storm, the novel taste for red meat, and all this…’ – he indicated the odd pattern of blood that still stained the marble floor, despite Miss Stoner’s best efforts at cleansing – ‘and then the supposed “ghost” of Julia Roylott walks in front of three witnesses! Who do you think it must be?’

‘You mean—’ but I could not bear to put into words the horror, the abomination that was the only possible solution to the conundrum he posed.

‘I do,’ he said, with the utmost gravity. ‘And if you are right about the portraits – and I don’t doubt it – then it is by no means the first time that such terrible arts have been practised in this delightful family. Miss Smith – or Mrs Mandeville, as perhaps we should learn to call her – must have found ready references here in the library, when she decided upon her course. And we must retrace her steps this afternoon, what is left of it.’

‘But why?’ I could think of no branch of forbidden knowledge that I trembled more to study.

‘Do you not see? We shall have to send it back to its rest! And before it does any more harm. We have at least until darkness. Sunset falls a little after a quarter to eight.’

And right-away he started to pick out books to no scheme I could decipher, until I realised that each volume in the precarious piles on the table was less dusty than its fellows upon the shelves. Sir Grimesby had not exaggerated his forebears’ fervour for book collecting. There were many titles I recognised but, being banned, had never before set eyes on, and many more I did not, but that my friend greeted with the joyful cry of a man encountering a comrade believed lost in action. Borel’s _Bibliotheca Chimica_ , the _Turba Philosophorum_ , Jabir’s _Liber Investigationis_ , Artephius’ _Clavis Sapientiae_ , Albert of Cologne’s _Theatrum Chemicum_ , Fludd’s _Clavis Alchimiae_ , the _Red Book_ attributed to King Solomon and other ancient grimoires, the _Necronomicon_ in the original Arabic, Agrippa’s _Opera Omnia_ , Levi’s _La Clef des Grands Mystères_ – and that is just to name a handful. Chemistry, alchemy, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astrology, magic, the pile encompassed all of these and more, with authors from every continent of our globe, and dates ranging from antiquity to a mere fifteen years past. It was the study of a month, and we had rather less than six hours!

But to my portion fell none of these, but rather three thick enciphered volumes of the journals of Arcturus, the twelfth-century traveller whom Miss Stoner had called a mystic. The cipher would have foxed even my friend, I believe, but for the lucky chance of a torn leaf of the Latin Bible being trapped in the front of the first of the volumes, which proved to be the key to the cryptogram. As it happened, the cipher was to be the least of my troubles, for the handwriting was tiny, cramped and archaic in style, the language a bastardised Latin that I could scarcely make out, and the whole used every inch of the vellum and was riddled with the most mystifying abbreviations. It was, I own, a blessing to have something to occupy my thoughts – some way of assisting my friend that did not require me to steep my soul in the blackest of arts – yet there seemed no end to the labour. ‘But what am I to look for?’ I enquired.

My friend interrupted his examination not of the leaves but of the spine of one of the volumes, an ancient chemical tome. ‘I believe it to have been Arcturus who brought back that statue,’ he said. Ever since I had shown him the picture, the peculiar thing had seemed to loom large in my friend’s thoughts. ‘None of his descendants left Albion until long after the Box Hill fort was abandoned. Where he found it, what it was being used for, what he made of it, anything of that nature.’ But by the time I thought to ask where to start, he was already deep engrossed and returned no answer, beyond some mutterings about ‘essential salts’ that I took to relate to his reading, not mine.

I thought it wisest to get some sense of the man by starting at the beginning. The first volume proved not to be a journal but rather a personal history, seemingly penned long after most of the events it described. It opened thus:

> Having forsworn the name of my fathers, I take now the name of Arcturus, the brightest star of the night sky, a light in these dark days—for I was born in the 27th year of the reign of the accurs’d Henry Beauclerc, son of the even more accurs’d Wm called the Bastard. My great-grandfather was lord of _[the name was scratched out]_ & lost both lands & head at Hastings. My father w’d not flee his ancestral lands, but not caring to raise his only son in a cave, sent me to my grandmother’s people in the North, who gave me over to the Benedictines for my educatn. The monks taught me to revere their Lord God Almighty, but He had scorned my forefathers when they called upon Him, & so I crossed my fingers & forked my tongue when I made my prayers. They taught me likewise my Latin, & French too, but I spurn it, the vile language of our hideous enslavers. I will cut out my tongue before ever I speak theirs.

The history of our Dark Ages was dark in truth to me. What little was taught to children was hardly reliable, glorifying the peace and prosperity of our Queen’s reign by expounding on all the wars and famines that had gone before. To think that if She had not invaded, we might all now be speaking French! Henry, I dimly recalled, had been the name of the last King of Albion – and even to a Restorationist, the idea of a monarch who was not Her Victorious Majesty was surpassing strange. The usurper Henry Shortcoats, all the histories dubbed him, and I could not see Arcturus passing over such an opportunity to mock his enemy, so it was probably not the same man. Entire dynasties of kings had once used the same name to give an illusion of what our Queen was in truth! Much more followed in the same vein, which I skipped, before coming to an account of how he had come to leave Albion, which seemed more to our purpose.

> And so in my 16th year, with the English throne embattled betwixt a host of contenders equally vile, did I resolve to turn my back on these troubl’d shores & to seek my fortunes upon an ocean that c’d scarce be more turbulent. Having no coin, I paid for my passage aboard the _St Peter_ with the strength of my arms at the oars  & the nimbleness of my feet in the rigging. How it burned me, with my blood so proud, to be little more than a slave! There & then did I vow, to what Deity I know not, never to return to England until I had amass’d enough gold to buy back my family’s lands, & a dozen ships the size of that cockleshell besides!
> 
> I soon found myself to have the very Devil’s luck at sea. When the _St Peter_ founder’d off the coast of Brittany, I was one of 3 who got ashore alive, the others being fellow oarsmen. We clung to the rocks till the storm passed  & the tide brought ashore the cargo—I took away a cunning chest of spices, tight sealed, & 7 barrels of wine, & sundry other goods to set me up as a sea-trader with my new friends.

Sea-trader was the least of it, piracy would be a more accurate term for the man’s activities over the two decades following! He did indeed seem to enjoy the Devil’s own luck, surviving more than one more shipwreck and a number of engagements with vessels far more heavily armed than his. It made stirring reading! True to his vow, he did not return to his native land but sailed ever more distant from her shores, and as he journeyed further south and east a change seemed to steal over him. Instead of the fever for gold that once had consumed him, he fell to seeking something he was hard pressed to put into words, though he tried repeatedly. The first volume ended with words that sent a chill to my heart:

> When I dream on land, my dreams are as those of other men. But when I dream at sea, always do I dream the same. I glimpse a great city, greater by far than Baghdad or Constantinople, a city of glass-smooth blocks the size of hills, a city whose spires rise slender as a woman & taller than a mountain, a city that takes our mere human notions of rightness & transforms them—& all sunken, sunken beneath the waves! And lately when I dream I hear Her whispering, whispering words I cannot recall on waking, or recall only as gibberish—but I know She is calling, ever calling to me. Often have I wished not to wake! I have tried chewing poppy heads as the Arabians do, but find it gives only a deep sleep without dreams.

It was in a cold sweat that I turned to the next volume, to find my key rendered it as utter nonsense! My friend suggested trying subsequent verses or chapters of the Bible, and it was not long before we hit upon the correct passage.

‘The statue,’ he admonished, glancing over my progress, ‘keep to the statue!’

This volume opened when the author had attained his fortieth year – 1167 by our calendar – and did indeed take the form of a journal. It seemed Arcturus’s dreams had grown plainer, and he had been driven to attempt a great expedition that even his friends stigmatised as madness. He had somehow obtained sight of the famous lost map of the Moroccan al-Idrisi, and so occupied with its great south-eastern ocean had he become that he commissioned a vessel from Venice to Acre, with no less an aim than of crossing the desert to Baghdad and proceeding down the Tigris to the port of Basrah, and thence eastwards – though he did not name it – towards India. His curses on his erstwhile crewmates, who had deserted him to a man, and his prosaic descriptions of all the daily minutiae of the voyage alternated with ominous accounts of his nightly visions, ominous not for any particular detail but for their insistence, and for the weight the waking man clearly placed on their guidance. Mindful of my friend’s command, and of the hours of daylight seeping through my fingers like a day’s water ration from a leaking flask, I took to seeking the word ‘statue,’ and so almost missed the first mention of the thing.

> 11th—Many cities ancient & fair once adorn’d this Land of the Seven Rivers, so my Arabian guide tells me. _[By this and other indications I believe he had now reached the Indus.]_ So does the man like to dress his maggoty meat with honey  & spices! His pale descriptn approaches not the grandeur of my great sunken city—yet does Her voice each night grow ever more clamorous. How can a whisper be a shriek? We head inland. The river is navigable for many leagues at this season, & the jungle thick enough to conceal any manner of thing.
> 
> 12th—The native peoples, what little we see of them, seem of a debased sort, not to be compar’d with the civilis’d Arab. If cities there be in this land, their citizens are long fled. We hear odd noises at night, & keep to the boat. The mercenaries mutter of tribes that offer the blood of foreigners in sacrifice to what some call the Devil & others Chaos. But what is Chaos but another order, and that the 1st & greatest? Even the monks allow’d that! The men pray to their god & I to mine, the difference being mine answers, tho’ Her answers be yet obscure to me.
> 
> 13th—The most wondrous thing! She has guided me to what I sought, tho’ I knew it not! I hold it in my two hands & almost do I walk in Her drowned kingdom, & gaze upon Her awful face! I am certain if I do but sleep with it press’d against my breast then I will comprehend Her words at last! But I am ahead of myself in my rapture. Last night the noise kept us from our beds – drumming, ceaseless drumming, & shouts, & shrieks, & animal-like squeals, but something else drifted by in snatches on the breeze, an unearthly harmony like naught I had ever heard, & yet as familiar & dear to me as my own toes. I c’d not rest till I had heard more. The guide urged turning back but I confin’d the lily-liver’d man to his cabin so he c’d not order the boat put about, & supplied myself with 12 dauntless fellows armed with all the armoury c’d provide.
> 
> We set out before nightfall in the directn all agreed the sounds had come from. Darkness made its usual swift entrance in these climes, & the drumming with it. A dim red glow like a European sunset lit our steps, & the other sound soon broke upon our ears, a harmony so elevated, so sublime, it c’d have been the music of the spheres—& it burst upon me that it was the very equivalent to the ear of my great city to the eye! But a moment later I saw all was deceit—the unearthly harmony of which this jangle of notes was but a pitiful earth-bound echo sounded in my head alone. What we saw when the jungle gave out can scarce be put into words. A circle of standing stones, ringed about by a moat of fire, & within, 50 or more dark naked bodies, men & women alike, prancing & capering & coupling as if decorating some page of the Bible that taught of sinners burning in the Pit—& yet no demons with pitchforks watched them, no wrath of Heaven envelop’d them, they danced for joy, & for the joy of Chaos alone! We crept closer. In their midst the priest played his pipes over a blood-drenched altar stone, & beside that rose another tall smooth stone bearing at its crest their totem. My Saracen friends saw it as their sacred duty to put a stop to the unholy revels with their swords, but I had no thought but to capture the totem—for I saw at once it was a thing of such awful power that it c’d hardly be allow’d to remain in the hands of these degenerate souls. Trusting to the blood-thirstiness of my hired men I had not thought to arm myself—but to this stunted race I was a giant, & the act was simply done.
> 
> The natives pursued us to the boat, where we found they had been before us—our guide will not speak again—& continu’d their pursuit on the bundles of logs they call vessels, but we swiftly outdistanc’d them. We shall not see them again.

Though Arcturus did not trouble to describe his prize in other than mystical terms, it was plain this totem could only be the missing statue that had excited my friend almost as much as it had excited its discoverer more than seven centuries ago. I studied leaf after leaf but could find no further account of the thing: the man turned secretive about his purposes even to the pages of his own diary! He had even ceased to record his strange sea-dreams. At the very end of the volume, he set out for Albion in the nineteenth year of Henry Shortcoats’ reign. How long was the Last King said to have ruled? Was it twenty years or twenty-one? I opened the third volume, my blood a-boil, but as before my key no longer worked—and this time neither I nor my friend could find the passage that would unlock the man’s final words.

‘He might have chosen another book altogether,’ said my friend, putting down the Bible after another barren attempt. ‘To a man who worshipped a goddess from this city of the deeps, a text sacred to the Roman god must have come to seem blasphemous. But unless Sir Grimesby should happen to know which of these volumes, if any, originated in Arcturus’s collection, I can see no way forward that we now have time to try.’

‘The portrait!’ I cried. ‘Perhaps it might tell us something more.’

‘Doubtless it was painted centuries after his death,’ said my friend, but he followed me over to the dismal picture hanging to the left of the chimneypiece. Just above its ornate gold frame I noticed the little spyhole through to the great bedchamber where Julia Stoner had died.

It might not date from the twelfth century, but the portrait was certainly not modern. So darkened with age was it, little was clear save a face dominated by the Roylott beak of a nose, with pale eyes and a queer twisted smile upon its lips. No birthdate was painted on the frame but his date of death was given as 1176, the very year Our Conquering Queen came. My friend lifted it off the wall and carried it to the table beneath one of the chandeliers that we had employed for our researches. He took up a candle and examined the picture minutely, even scratching at its surface with a fingernail and inspecting the greasy residue as if it might speak to him. Then he brought out the little tin case he always carried with his grease-paints, and started to daub very carefully at the background with the paraffin oil we used to remove the nasty stuff after the play was over.

‘There,’ he said, after several passes. ‘Do you not begin to see something in the background?’

On the left rose Box Hill’s distinctive profile, but dark woods clothed its bare white slopes, and standing stones crowned its summit, and around them clung a strange bubbling cloud, though the sky was otherwise clear. On the right the view seemed to stretch as far as the sea, though it lay beyond the power of any human eye, and shapes were dimly sketched amongst the waves, shapes that reminded one inexorably of the magic-lantern shadows that embellished my historical play.

 


	11. The Piper and the Gate

The stage was set for the Limping Piper’s final bow. Shadows draped the arena, the lights were dimmed, the props were all in place, and surely no audience could anticipate a performer with more anxiety! Thus had I awaited the half-blood some called a prince, alone in the dark with my knives. But the half-blood, however monstrous, was a monster of our world; a monster of flesh and blood, even if that blood were green; a living being that could be killed. What we now awaited was no longer of our world. The blood that ran in its veins was borrowed. And how could one kill a thing that no longer lived? I had my knives and my pistol – but this time I did not wait alone. The baronet had his hunting rifle and his old dress-sword. My friend was armed only with words, words and his colossal intellect, yet I thought him the most likely of the three of us to succeed.

As to what it was the Piper had summoned – the pitiless evil that had slain Julia Stoner, and perhaps Mrs Mandeville, and might have swallowed me likewise last night but for my friend’s presence – even his colossal intellect seemed to have gained no very clear picture. Of Lady Roylott’s ‘Dweller on the Threshold,’ not a glimmer appeared in all the lore my friend could draw upon. Yet here and there came cryptic references to an entity that was said to guard the threshold between life and death, which he thought might relate to it – though so intertwined with the old forbidden gods of the underworld had the legend become that no precise intelligence could be gleaned. If my friend had formed any plan for dealing with it, he had not shared it. Our solitary hope, and it seemed a forlorn one, must be to prevent the terrible thing from ever being summoned.

Just then a most fearful scream resounded in the library’s gloom. Miss Stoner! We must be standing guard in the wrong place! My friend’s fingers fastened tight about my wrist. Then he let out a little huff of a laugh. ‘The peacocks are restless tonight,’ he murmured.

‘They always screech like that when they’re roosting,’ said the baronet. ‘I should have got rid of the noisy brutes with the rest of the infernal menagerie, but my Julia loved them so.’

His words reminded me that to my friend and I, the Limping Piper was a horror, a supreme abomination, a _thing_ to be laid to rest. Sir Grimesby faced the harder fate by far—and worse, I feared that he rejoiced in it. Never had I loved a woman enough to ask her to become my wife, and now I never would: he had loved one woman for as long as I had drawn breath! The old tales told of men risking all to rescue their wives from the underworld, and I trembled lest the baronet believed he might be living in one. For him, sorrow could be the sole end to our awful vigil, sorrow heaped upon sorrow.

The blackness was near complete now. The ruddy moonlight could not penetrate these depths. It was impossible not to dwell on those grim scenes the library had witnessed over the past weeks. Impossible not to envisage the housekeeper stringing up that poor cat and slitting its throat; impossible not to imagine its blood dripping onto the chill marble, dripping not six feet from where we lay hid, I could hear it, drip drip drip—it was only the gutters. Outside the wind whined, and a whirlwind gathered the ashes together and—I must turn my thoughts. If only it were that easy! Every hoot of a hunting owl was a cry, every creak in the great roof a footstep. My friend sat like a statue, but my straining ears could make out the little whistles as the baronet breathed, the little rustles as the big man shifted his position. The village clock struck the quarters, and each one seemed to last an hour. Midnight tolled, and one then two.

It was after three when we heard it. So subdued was the sound I could have taken it for the baronet beside me, yet it came from beneath us, beneath the floor. Footsteps! Then a gentle creaking, then a light glimmered! My friend laid his hand upon my arm. But the face haloed in the lamplight was not the one we were expecting, nay, dreading. So different was it, that at first my befuddled eyes could make no sense of what was before them: a dark face, a snowy beard—the Indian fakir! And with no more sound than a snake, all three slithered out from the underground passage. What sinister development was this? The baronet would have sprung up and challenged them, but for my friend restraining him. And so we three Albion men sat tight in the deep shadow while the Indians stalked barefoot, silent as three panthers, to take up a station across the other side of the library. Their lamp went out. The blackness seemed blacker still. I wondered at my friend’s icy calm. Surely we risked having our throats slit in the night! Or worse: the old fakir had not moved like one stone-blind. The tales my army friends had told of Indian magic revolved in my mind, each one more fantastic than the last—and so distracted did I become that, were it not for my friend’s urgent fingers digging into my arm, the click, the halting footsteps might almost have escaped my notice. There was a fresh scent, too, stealing over the oil and hot metal of our dark-lantern, a scent so bizarre, so out of place, I could not at first pin it down. Hot milk!

My friend opened the lantern’s shutter. Almost at the same instant, the Indians must have done likewise. And for one long terrible moment, pinned in the twin bright beams, the shape on the gallery was clear as daylight.

The lantern fell with a tremendous clatter and went out. A great howling scream reverberated about the room but from whose lips it issued I could not guess. It might have been my own. My friend buried his face against my chest. His hands clawed at me as if he wanted to crawl inside my very body. ‘The cat! The cat!’ burst from his lips.

How can I describe the sight that so unmanned my imperturbable friend? That caused the giant of a baronet to faint dead away? I could say Drago’s green-soaked body would no longer haunt my dreams—or if it did, it would be but a pleasant respite from the horror of that thing. It wore a lady’s crimson walking dress with a jaunty blue-and-yellow trim—but it was no lady. It was as though some sculptor had moulded the wax in one form, had a change of heart and assayed another, then abandoned the _maquette_ unfinished in despair—and yet it breathed and moved.

And before any of the living had recovered those capacities, the dead commenced its awful piping. Proximity did not make the sound any more musical. The deep wailing notes were a hymn to madness, to despair, to nightmares, to all those things that lurk in the dark, in the cracks, on the edges, to those things older than the earth, older than time, that threaten to return our world to the chaos out of which it was shaped. And in the heart of that most evil of places, slowly, silently, with no more fuss than a bubbling kettle, something was boiling up out of the gloom.

‘He comes!’ This was one of the Indians. ‘He comes!’

My friend managed to control his shaking hands sufficiently to coax a candle into flame. He held it aloft. ‘The statue,’ he urged. ‘We must get to the statue!’

But it was too late. ‘He is coming!’ announced the fakir, in his own language. ‘He Who Walks Between Worlds is coming!’

And while we Albion men were hobbled by naught but horror, the Indian boy swarmed up the carvings of the oak screen as if they were a ladder, and snatched the statue from the very hands of the abomination that had once been Julia Roylott. It dropped the pipe – which splintered on the marble beneath – and gave a great bellow of rage, more like a lion’s roar than any human utterance. The boy paid not the slightest heed, tossing the thing lightly down – my friend let out an involuntary hiss – but the youth plucked it from the air as if it were a brass ball he were juggling, and knelt to present it to the fakir.

I cocked my pistol, but my friend stayed my hand. ‘Peace,’ he said. ‘Seven centuries ago it was taken from these people with spilled blood, and a great harm was done with it. Is that not so?’

‘That is so,’ said the old man, and it was in English that he now spoke, and not the broken English of the juggler but the precise, cultured English of a scholar of one of the universities. ‘His father,’ and he nodded towards the baronet, still prostrate on the floor, ‘killed my forefather for the love of it. But there is no time to rehearse ancient ills.’

And indeed the form in the gloom above our heads was growing ever clearer, and the Shadow drawing nearer. It was difficult to say what it resembled, for it resembled nothing on this earth, and yet its kindred with our royal lines was plain to see. The faded circle of blood seemed to have some power over it, but where that was broken the shape groped outwards, blindly, terribly, towards the wall with the great chimneypiece.

‘The band!’ moaned Sir Grimesby, who was at last beginning to stir. ‘The emerald band!’ He buried his head in his arms, as if that might lend any protection from the Shadow.

The old Indian nodded to the younger one, who drew his pipe from his sleeve and struck up the hellish tune, while he himself began to chant in a language so ill adapted to the human mouth that it sounded as if he had swallowed a dictionary with a curious lack of vowels. The third of their trio scampered down as nimbly as a monkey, and took up a frenzied accompaniment on a pair of little hand-drums that he had been carrying on his back. My friend, after a brief interval, joined his voice to the chanting, striking his hands on the table in time with the frantic beat of the drums, though they beat to no rhythm I could discern. Not for the first time in this strangest of weeks I thought he must have taken leave of his senses – but the shape in the dimness receded, and the Shadow diminished and died. The thing on the gallery loosed a horrible wordless howl, like an animal caught in a trap.

When all the cacophony had died away likewise, I asked, ‘Was _that_ this Dweller on the Threshold?’

‘He Who Walks Between Worlds, you named it,’ said my friend, turning to the Indians. And at the words all three made the most profound salaams.

‘Those are two of His many names,’ replied the old fakir.

‘But how did the thing slay Julia Stoner?’ I was still all at sea.

‘Through the spyhole,’ said my friend. ‘The half-bloods are constrained to one shape – not so the Old Ones.’ And my imagination conjured that terrible form oozing through the tiny aperture to writhe around the posts of the great bed where the unfortunate maiden slumbered. The floor had proved inviolable last night, and I thanked all the stars for it.

The old fakir must have sensed my horror. ‘He has returned to the abyss from whence He came,’ he said.

‘Has it gone for good?’ That seemed to be the salient point in all this mumbo-jumbo.

‘Before anything was, He was. After all is gone, He will be.’

And again the three salaamed, and my spirit revolted within me. ‘But how can you venerate something so utterly evil?’

The old man did not seem perturbed in the least by my question. ‘He is not evil, He simply is,’ he said. ‘The knife that cuts your meat can also slit your throat. The evil rests in the hand that wields it.’ And he stared down with his sightless eyes at the statue in his two hands, as if the thing whispered to him. I was reminded of what Arcturus had written, and for the first time I began to believe that the grotesque little thing might indeed be the idol he had brought back from the Indus basin all those centuries ago.

‘And the hand that wields that statue wields His power,’ said my friend. ‘Or part of it.’ His eyes too were locked on the black carving between the fakir’s dark hands, and so greedily did his gaze drink in every detail that I had to wonder whether the evil thing whispered to him, also. But when he resumed speaking his voice was no different from usual. ‘I have heard of these totems,’ he said. ‘There is rumoured to be one representing each of the Old Ones. Victoria’s is said to be locked in the highest turret of the Tower, the Black One’s is entombed in the deepest bowels of the Great Pyramid, and so on. But aside from Arcturus’s journal, no-one who has ever spoken of them claims to have laid eyes on one.’

But a sharp creak from above our heads recalled our attention to the library. Sir Grimesby was no longer cowering on the floor. He must have taken the more usual route up the concealed stairs to the gallery while we had been distracted, for he now emerged with a candle behind the thing he had once called his wife. It was no less disturbing a sight by candlelight.

‘Julia, my love,’ he said. ‘You came back to me.’

His tone was as one might speak to a small straying child, and I felt for Lady Roylott, whose only insanity, it seemed, had been to try to confide the fruits of her long researches in her husband. All that was left of the poor lady backed away from the pool of warm light, and made a low growl that might have been a warning, or simply the best that mouth could make of his name. If warning it was, the baronet did not heed it. He stepped forward, and with an odd inhuman grace, the thing sprang onto the balustrade. For one long moment it balanced there. Then it dived. Red blood again baptised the green and white marble of the library floor.

It was a fall that must have killed anything living—but the thing was not living. I had seen men in Afghanistan who – though their bodies were broken – did not know how to die, and I did what I had to. But even with six bullets in its brain, the thing still moaned, and stirred, and tried to rise.

My friend pulled me aside. ‘That is not the way,’ he said.

The fruits of his own researches proved to be only a handful of words, if such peculiar clusters of syllables could rightly be so called—but they were effective where bullets were not. The change was awful to see, but at the end naught of the late Lady Roylott remained save a fine dust that settled at the feet of her father-in-law’s portrait.

Perhaps it was the way the portrait’s lips seemed to smirk at the sight, perhaps the man had intuited something of what we had uncovered about his family’s evil past, perhaps there was no reason beyond a spirit shattered by too much suffering, but Sir Grimesby’s first act on bursting back onto the library floor was to set his candle to the picture.

‘Take that!’ he cried, as if the painted ears could hear him. ‘I’ve killed you once, you malevolent old goat, I can kill you again, as many times as need be!’

The aged oil paint seemed to delight in the fire: the entire surface seethed and rippled like a desert mirage, and it was mere moments before the last Sir Arthur was sheeted in flames. Save that six of us stood witness, and all who escaped the library with our lives say likewise, I would hesitate to credit my senses—but as the fire consumed the painted figure, the face seemed to contort, the body to writhe, and a long shrill shriek rang out that ended in a laugh as awful as anything we heard that dreadful night. But we had no time to consider what it might presage.

Perhaps it was simple ill chance, perhaps the portrait truly was malevolent, but small scraps of burning canvas flaked from the painting to fly about the library like locusts, and like locusts they consumed all they touched. The evil place seemed to want to burn! The first to go up was the lamp oil my friend had spilled when he dropped the lantern, and with our incautious footsteps, the six of us proved to have spread the stuff far and wide. With no water jug to douse the flames and nothing save our clothes to smother them beneath, we were soon reduced to shifting the most combustible materials away from the fire’s path. We, I say, but heedless of the commotion he had created, senseless to the fiery shower that threatened to ignite his very hair, the baronet knelt weeping amidst the ashes of his wife, and the giant of a man would wrestle anyone who tried to save him.

‘Beware!’ cried the young Indian juggler. ‘The big wood, she goes!’

His frantic gestures made it plain it was the oak screen he meant. Like a bridge whose piers had been mined, the massive hulk crashed to the ground—and we had failed to drag the baronet clear. But the full extent of the disaster was greater still. Countless tons of solid oak, and a wall of smoke and flame almost as solid, now blocked our only exit. We turned from saving books to saving lives, and in our despair were contemplating the chimney – the boy at least might escape that way – when help came from a most unexpected quarter: Miss Stoner!

I need not prolong this narrative with details of how the lady effected our rescue via the roof lantern, making use of the ropes with which we had earlier descended. Suffice to say she proved both brave and resourceful, and the medieval roof prolonged its life until all were restored to _terra firma_. My friend was the last man out, and his first words on reaching the ground, gasped out between coughs, were ‘the statue!’ He even broke into the fakir’s effusions of gratitude to grasp the frail old man by the shoulders with soot-blackened hands and demand whether he had it safe, as if he might otherwise plunge back into the inferno to find the thing. The lady looked rather nonplussed at the interruption, I thought, while her stepfather lay dead, his body incinerated, and her home lit up the horizon as if sunrise had chanced to visit Stoke Moran early this Monday morn.

‘Fear not,’ said the old fakir. ‘It is safe.’ And at my friend’s urging, with no little reluctance, he drew out the black soapstone idol that appeared to have eclipsed all else in my friend’s mind.

There were arms and legs and heads enough for the Hindoo goddess, certainly, but as to the hair and snakes and flames, all quite plainly stood for those anatomical traits that most clearly marked our Royal Families as alien to this earth. But I could see why Sir Grimesby’s cataloguer, otherwise so assiduous, had described the thing so carelessly. To examine it critically, even in the tawny flickering glow of the blaze behind us, was to court madness – for there was something wrong with it, something that went beyond the obvious monstrosity of the subject matter. It was like those optical illusions where the picture flits between two different forms – like and yet not like, for it never settled into a form the mind could tolerate.

The fakir – though he would not permit my poor friend to lay so much as a finger on it – allowed me to pick the statue up, and I turned it this way and that in my hands, seeking the source of that wrongness. And scratched on the base of its pedestal, I discovered, so indistinct that the cataloguer must have overlooked it, was the Roylott coat of arms: one side depicted stars, perhaps Arcturus’s constellation of Boötes, above the wavy lines of the Deeps, the other what I had before taken for a stylised daisy, or a sunflower even, with petals strangely wilted. Above the shield, in the same medieval Latin as Arcturus’s journals, was engraved the motto, ‘For seven lives of men we serve.’ Below it stood the enigmatic utterance, ‘He knows the gate. He is the gate. He is the key and guardian of the gate.’

As I put it down my eye was caught. If I stared at it just _so_ , then it made sense. And as I stared I saw a great wave crashing over R’lyeh—a land with five suns swallowed by an earthquake—a cloud like a monstrous mushroom rising into a clear blue sky—a volcano raining ash on Pompeii—soldiers like insects with silver skins and six limbs firing odd weapons on protesters draped in orange things like flowers—riot, famine, war, disease, disaster, madness, vision after vision of chaos past present future, on our earth and on strange worlds. But strangest of all were the ones that showed my friend and I—entering a cell where Sir Grimesby was dead with a speckled viper coiled about his brow—lounging in flamboyant dressing gowns beside the fire in a comfortable room I knew only as Moriarty’s lair—

And I knew what we must do.

~*~

**Editor’s note:** _Discovered among the papers of John H. Watson, M.D., after his death last November, the manuscript breaks off abruptly at the foot of the 97 th leaf; no succeeding page has been found. It is unclear whether the first-person narrative represents an early assay at fiction from the pen that was later to chronicle the exploits of that most famous of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, or an account of the delusions of a patient, or even of the author. Dr Watson served in the British Army Medical Corps in the Afghan Campaign of 1878–80, and might conceivably have suffered from the serviceman’s nervous condition now identified as shell shock. The reference to Tsar Alexander II’s assassination suggests a date of 1881, insofar as events so far divorced from our reality can be dated. The last of the Surrey Roylotts died in 1883; apart from their long residence in Stoke Moran, all details of that family are invented. The figure referred to as ‘Rache’ or ‘Vernet’ cannot be traced._

—H.P.L.; 1926

 

**Author's Note:**

> I thank Avanti_90 for editing & the members of Picowrimo for encouragement. In addition to [Gaiman's story](http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf), my work draws directly on Conan Doyle's story, '[The Speckled Band](http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/canon/spec.htm)', with some key dialogue loosely paraphrased; there is also a paraphrased quotation from Lovecraft's '[The Dunwich Horror](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dh.aspx)'. It also owes a direct debt to Lovecraft's _[The Case of Charles Dexter Ward](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx)_ & '[The Call of Cthulhu](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx)', and numerous other ACD Holmes stories, and pays homage to a swath of Victorian melodrama, most obviously _Jane Eyre_ & _The Moonstone_.


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